Ella Taylor

Somewhere in the distended middle of The Patriot -- a bargain for your buck at just under three hours -- the villain in chief, a British army officer with equine nostrils and an annoying habit of whacking innocent bystanders to the American War of Independence, finds himself under serious pressure......

Photo by David Axelbank Greg Harrison’s Groove, an eager puppy of a movie about an impromptu rave party in an abandoned San Francisco warehouse, bristles with worthy drug cautions — you’d think this was a health club from all the bottled water being passed around. As if this weren’t enough,......

Kenneth Branagh‘s Love’s Labour‘s Lost mates one of Shakespeare’s frothier romantic comedies with the ‘30s musical, and on the face of it they make an attractive couple. Both traffic in the rush offered by flirtation and playing hard to get; both breeze along with offhand insouciance, underlit by a mature......

The face of Takeshi ”Beat“ Kitano, preternaturally smooth and shiny from surgical reconstruction after a near-fatal motorbike accident in 1994, is a mask of goofy implacability, as if the Japanese actor and director were about to fire off either a burst of giggles, or of bullets. Kitano likes to goose......

Promise you won’t go away if I let on that in Michael Almereyda‘s Hamlet -- the 44th film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy -- the “To be or not to be” speech is delivered at a Blockbuster Video outlet, under a sign that reads “Go Home Happy.” Hamlet has been updated......

Hating the rich is a distinctly un-American pastime. Starved for aristocracy, schooled to aspire up and away from the middle class, Americans have traditionally admired wealth -- especially if it’s hard-earned from the bottom up -- too much to keep a proper resentment on the boil, as most self-respecting Europeans......

Tom Tykwer is hot. Snatching victory from under the nose of imminent Oscar winner Pedro Almodovar a couple of weeks ago, the German director made off with an Independent Film Project Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film, for Run Lola Run, a kinetic little number that so winningly caught the......

When it comes to exaggerated emotions, religion and movies were made for one another. Both can fill us with the oceanic feelings that the grind of everyday life forbids: exaltation, ecstasy, the sense that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Film and faith answer to the longing for......

Steven Soderbergh has given Julia Roberts the gift of a big mouth, and I don‘t mean the ever-ready, wide-angle smile that made her a megastar. If the low-key charm that comes so easily to Roberts has made her box-office gold, it’s also sentenced her to girl-film mediocrity. Notting Hill and......

The Scottish actor Peter Mullan, who took Cannes by storm when he played a recovering drunk trying to make good in Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe, has turned director with a likably odd paean to mother-worship, set in the tough streets of his hometown of Glasgow. In Orphans, four......