Ella Taylor

Photo by Michael PowersANYONE WITH A MIND TO TEST THE NOTION THAT L.A. moviegoers will digest only pap might have joined the sell-out crowd that showed up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the summer of 1997 for a five-week series celebrating film sound as an art......

SOMEWHERE EN ROUTE FROM NOVEL TO FILM, BRUCE Wagner's blistering leap for the Hollywood jugular, I'm Losing You, changed shape and became heartfelt. Perhaps Wagner felt that The Player had already covered the satirical territory, or wanted to make a film that would have some appeal outside Bel Air, or......

1977: MY FIRST SUMMER IN AMERICA, AND NEW YORK seemed bent on showing me the movie version of itself. Hotter than hell and twice as humid, and everywhere the talk was of a pudgy maniac who, following instructions from a neighbor's dog, roamed the city offing girls with (it was......

Photo by Alex BaileyOSCAR WILDE WILL LIVE FOREVER, AND NOT JUST through his glittering one-liners. For all the playwright's scalding jabs at the London high society that made him its darling, then spat him out for failing to keep up appearances, Wilde was no cynic. A romantic idealist in his......

Photo by K. C. BaileyWEIGHED AGAINST OUR WRETCHEDLY HEEDLESS age, John Sayles' humane populism guarantees that each new film he makes seems more old-fashioned, more anachronistic than the one before. That's a compliment: American movies, if they pay attention at all, divide the working class into cops, robbers and salts......

WITH PERSUASION, THE BEST JANE AUSTEN ADAPTATION since Clueless, under his belt, the talented English director Roger Michell has gone studio with a romantic comedy wishfully built to foster hot vibe between Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Michell is in over his head, and the result is two films: a......

IN FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT: STOLEN PORTRAITS, A ROUTINE talking-heads documentary accompanying the new Truffaut retrospective at the Nuart, there's a lovely clip of Jean Renoir, looking like a benevolent gnome as he notes that Jules and Jim was the film that made him "most fondly jealous of Truffaut." The old genius,......

Photo by Joe LedererBERTRAND TAVERNIER IS FOREVER FIGHTING WARS on behalf of Everyman. Even on his most dramatic canvas (world war in his masterpieces Life and Nothing But and 1996's Captain Conan, drug wars in L.627), God is in the details of people working together under pressure. The French director......

"I AM INTERESTED," JAPANESE NEW WAVE DIRECTOR Shohei Imamura once declared, "in the relationship of the lower part of the human body to the lower part of the social structure." Now 72, Imamura has devoted his working life to unbuttoning the politesse of his native country, as mirrored in the......