Ella Taylor

Other things being equal, Julia Roberts paired with Brad Pitt would waltz away with the box office if the movie were How To Deodorize Your Carpet. DreamWorks would probably have an easier time figuring out how to sell that film than they will The Mexican, and I mean that as......

If you think that the pink triangle was always a badge of gay pride, you ought to see Paragraph 175, a documentary about the persecution of German gays under the Third Reich -- and beyond -- that speaks so eloquently for itself, there‘s not much more for me to do......

Affable, cheery and witty raconteurs to a man, the goremeisters chatting volubly to the camera in The American Nightmare, Adam Simon’s lively documentary about the horror movies of the 1970s, would grace any dinner party. Either it pays to flush one’s night terrors out of the system via art, or......

Buried in the avalanche of advance blurbage that clogged my fax machine for weeks before this year’s Sundance Film Festival, lay an apparently guileless announcement by the ultracool fashion house Diesel -- which co-sponsored the festival‘s meet-and-greet space for nonfiction filmmakers -- to the effect that “Diesel strives to capture......

Photo by Ron Batzdorff The notion of Jennifer Lopez as a woman who has gone dateless for two years is as wildly implausible as it is deeply satisfying to the millions of us who lack Lopez’s more visible assets. In Adam Shankman’s genially undistinguished feature debut, The Wedding Planner, Lopez......

If I didn’t know better, I‘d say Ang Lee made his latest film expressly to reduce the marketing department at Sony Pictures Classics to gibbering wrecks. Behold Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon -- a martial-arts movie with Mandarin dialogue, no kung fu, and women taking the lion’s share of fight scenes......

To judge by his serene, faintly amused demeanor, Amos Gitai long ago accepted the mantle of bad boy to the Israeli cultural establishment. The 50-year-old director, whose oeuvre runs to more than 27 movies, videos and documentaries, most of which poke a quizzical nose into critical fissures in Israeli society,......

In a key sequence of Amos Gitai‘s searing memoir of his army experiences during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, four exhausted Israeli soldiers, thigh-deep in mud, labor to heave a stretcher bearing a wounded comrade to a rescue helicopter on the Golan Heights. The scene -- lifting, schlepping, dropping, cursing,......

I won‘t say lightning never strikes twice, but when a director blessed, or cursed, with the stupendous success M. Night Shyamalan pulled off in his first big movie, reaches in his second for the same emotional payoff -- and cash receipts -- he risks self-parody. If you thought Bruce Willis......