Ella Taylor

On August 11, 1989, I wrote my first film review for L.A. Weekly, as follows: With its whacked-out, wry sensibility, Steven Soderbergh’s first feature and winner of the Best Film and Best Actor awards at Cannes this year seems to promise more than the usual relationship movie. But the film’s......

It says a lot for actor Eddie Marsan that by the time we finish our conversation in his agent’s Beverly Hills office, I have a somewhat higher opinion of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky than the one I had going in. Marsan, a palpably nice man with one of those round, ruddy......

Critics commonly cite with approval actors who can “disappear” into their characters, but that’s rarely, in the best sense, held true of Kate Winslet. The British actress’ instinctive sensuality drives men crazy, but if her frank carnality is unapologetically contemporary, her body — a violin rather than a twig —......

If you’re younger than 20, you may only know him as the hairy Lycan from the Underworld franchise, but Welsh actor Michael Sheen’s résumé is stuffed with meaty roles as real-life legends of British culture from high to deliciously low. For English television, Sheen has played H.G. Wells; Kenneth Williams,......

1. Waltz With Bashir If ever there was proof that psychic agonies are not always best represented by realism, it’s Ari Folman’s soulful animated documentary about the deferred torment of former Israeli soldiers, himself included, who witnessed the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps......

For filmmaker Ari Folman, it began when a friend who had served with him during the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 told him about a recurring nightmare in which he was chased by 26 dogs he’d been ordered to kill just before the infamous Sabra-Shatila massacre (when the......

Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. It must be Christmas, and though the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, lately it seems that everyone is trying to......

Not long after her lovely 2006 film, Old Joy, received the terrific reviews and lousy box office that habitually reward talented makers of very low-budget movies, Kelly Reichardt had lunch with her old friend Todd Haynes. Reichardt had just seen Brokeback Mountain and raved about the performances of Heath Ledger......

Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class with any of the following schoolroom chestnuts — Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds or To Sir, With Love. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed, and big thoughts about the classroom as urban microcosm. Discuss the......