Ella Taylor

Working Class Act

Ella Taylor
Photo by Joss Barratt Ken Loach has been taken to task for romanticizing the proletariat. But it’s hard not to fall in love with the working-class Glaswegians in his new film, My Name Is Joe, with their gruff, understated kindness, boozy irreverence and fabulous verbal agil-ity. Such a one is......

Graceful Monsters

Ella Taylor
"He doesn't expect anything, if you know what I mean . . . He likes people to think he's ever so gay." Thus, in James Whale's 1932 classic The Old Dark House, does a cheeky young flapper sum up her tubby sugar daddy (Charles Laughton) for the benefit of a......

Ella Taylor's Blessings

Ella Taylor
An entertaining reversal: In 1998, "independent" distributors -- either beholden to their studio masters or flabby in their tastes -- lobbed us one softball after another, from Sliding Doors to Celebrity to Life Is Beautiful to Waking Ned Devine. Meanwhile, bless my jaded critic's soul if those big fat studios......

A Sad Man, A Bad Man, and Two Brawling Moms

Ella Taylor
Photo by Demme Todd Midway through Paul Schrader’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel Affliction, Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), a New Hampshire man whose tires have just been shot out by an enraged friend, stands beside his disabled truck and punches his cheek in pain and frustration. The gesture — Wade......

Psycho Killer

Ella Taylor
Photo by Suzanne Tenner Right before Marion Crane steps into the shower in Gus Van Sant’s dreary reconstruction of Psycho, the director adds his own bit of business to the scene in which she undresses, unaware that Norman Bates is watching her through a hole in the wall of Cabin......

Exterminated Angel

Ella Taylor
Photo by Phillip CarusoAn angel stalks this earth of late, renting space in the bodies of high-end male movie stars anxious to leaven their hard-boiled résumés with goodness and mercy. Nothing wrong with that - a bit of otherworldly first aid never goes amiss when reality grows dull or desperate......
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The 5,000-Pound Maus

Ella Taylor
Photo by Anne HallArt Spiegelman's Maus, the best-selling comic book in which the co-founder of Raw comics, now known for his out-there New Yorker covers, explored his tortured relationship to his father, Vladek, and to the Holocaust, tells the story of Vladek's survival in Auschwitz. Spiegelman is in Los Angeles......

Lèse-Majesté

Ella Taylor
Bollywood meets The Godfather in Elizabeth, a rollicking good time which Gramercy Pictures, in a valiant effort to snare moviegoers who wouldn't go to a period picture if it came with a free diamond tiara, is pleased to call a "historical thriller." Actually, this repossession of the life of England's......

Fatuous Fascism

Ella Taylor
In the mid-'80s, following a lecture by Irving Howe on the possibility of a valid art of the Holocaust, I enraged the famously testy lion of lefty lit-crit by venturing from the floor that the Holocaust television mini-series, coarse though it was, served a useful educative function for people who......

Crying Freedom

Ella Taylor
At 124 Bluestone Road, a lonely, ramshackle dwelling in post-Civil War rural Ohio where the runaway slave Sethe ekes out a meager existence with her sole surviving daughter, Denver, the dead are wider awake than the living. The house is haunted like you wouldn't believe, as the itinerant Paul D,......