Ella Taylor

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......

In Suzhou River, a waterlogged little jewel of a Chinese movie that you must rush out and see at once or else, a young videographer obsessively combs the crime-infested Shanghai waterfront, ostensibly to drum up work shooting the odd wedding or birthday party. In fact, he’s trying to find the......

Photo by Abbot Genser Even before the opening credits roll, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 exposes itself as a schizoid monster slapped together by uneasy bedfellows. Director Joe Berlinger begins with a pomo-skeptical commentary on The Blair Witch Project as phenom, featuring punditry from media types, critics and peevish......

Photo by Gino Mifsud The Contender opens with an act of literally splashy heroism that anyone with a healthy dose of Beltway paranoia might consider a carefully engineered career booster. Governor Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), a telegenic front-runner for vice president of the United States — the incumbent has obligingly......

I didn’t care for Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves — too much slack-jawed beatitude for my taste, and the director’s twisted madonna-whore complex made me very nervous. So I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier’s latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood, only without......

It‘s backlash time. Again. In the last few weeks, at least two prominent film critics have weighed in against the new nastiness in moviemaking, a malignancy of the spirit that manifests either in excesses of screen brutality or in the malicious creation of characters who are evil incarnate. The other......

“The time of Shampoo,” Pauline Kael wrote in a rave review of Hal Ashby’s 1975 sex comedy, “is so close to us that at moments we forget its pastness, and then we’re stung by the consciousness of how much has changed.” And how little, from where we stand now. Looking......

Asked several years ago how he gets along with his dyed-in-the-wool Republican parents, John Waters grinned his famous lupine grin and said, ”Anyone in his 40s who‘s still fighting with his parents is a big jerk.“ Couldn’t agree more, but though Waters is waxing downright avuncular of late -- while......

Patrice Leconte’s Girl on the Bridge spins a tale of weird love between a waif with no luck at all and a performer who’s grown accustomed to making his own. With that the resemblance to Léos Carax’s 1999 The Lovers on the Bridge ends: Carax’s wantonly excessive mood piece made......

In the opening scenes of Raul Ruiz’s dazzling adaptation of the last volume in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a dying Proust lies in his modest apartment, gasping for breath as he dictates to the faithful Céleste the life’s work for which he has, after years of obsessing......