Ella Taylor

For a pacifist film made on a thread of a budget ($50,000), The Terrorist manages to pack enough gore into its opening sequences to satisfy a commercial distributor with or without the patronage of John Malkovich, who adopted the Indian picture after seeing it at a festival in Cairo. Then,......

That, in essence, is Hanging Up -- yak, bicker, yak, bicker, make up, all courtesy of AT&T. I have not read Delia’s book, in which she nervously antes up her family‘s galloping dysfunction by divorcing her parents, but if the movie is at all faithful to its spirit, it must......

Built to beguile, The Cup takes its sweet time to tell a kindly tale about a bunch of novice Tibetan monks with a soccer habit that goes way beyond kicking an empty Coke can around when the abbot isn’t looking. Led by Orgyen (Jamyang Lodro), a winning urchin whose ear-to-ear......

The first literary work I ever borrowed from a public library was a monster-size comic book stuffed with tales of blood and guts, death and fornication, crime and punishment, sin and redemption -- all overlaid, I only dimly grasped at 7 years old, with a fierce tone of moral inquiry......

If you thought Travis Bickle defined the existential crisis of urban America, come stagger to the millennium with New York paramedic Frank Pierce. Together again, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader have tortured a novel by former ambulance attendant Joe Connelly into a sequel, of sorts, to Taxi Driver. Like Travis,......

Reviewing the all but impenetrable Schizopolis (a film I liked) a couple of years back, I concluded with all due unction that Steven Soderbergh, a director known for following his own nose rather than his agent‘s, had finally committed professional suicide. Shortly thereafter, the airily charming romantic comedy Out of......

Nothing unhinges the film critic more surely than a film festival, even the laid-back Canuck amiability of the Toronto international festival. It‘s not just that you have to see a minimum of three movies a day, up to eight if you’re nuts or feel compelled to pursue hot buzz by......

Aside from the rosy prime-time nostalgia of television, one dredges pop culture in vain for an upbeat view of life in the American suburb. Ever since Levittown, our cinema has, by all genre means possible, hacked away at the allegedly arid moonscapes that ring our cities, and pared down suburban......

The supernatural is on a roll, and what better gift to filmmakers bent on rendering the id tangible and marketable? Not to mention the rest of us who can‘t dwell in peace with the inexplicability of life and have no religion to do the explaining. Nothing like a spot of......