Ella Taylor

Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case the stakes are way higher, and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard......

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised......

You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns, war movies, or Gone With the Wind to predict the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted posh English......

With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet......

Pick a film by Arnaud Desplechin, and likely as not you’ll find a house full of labile French hobgoblins stewing volubly over old wounds and inflicting new ones where they hurt most. Elegantly worded internecine warfare defines family in the Desplechin canon, and in his ecstatically bitchy new film, A......

I’m telling Danny Boyle over coffee that his new film, Slumdog Millionaire, is his best by far. “I hope it comes across that I had a real blast making it,” the British director murmurs politely. Either the coffee is overcaffeinated, or Boyle’s Lancashire friendliness disarms me, or I’ve had it......

Lance Hammer’s Ballast centers on a black boy whose single mother was once a junkie, who makes occasional drug drops on his motorbike for a gang of local dealers, and who sometimes waves a gun. There’s also a death, a near-death and a physical attack on the boy and his......

On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezer-ish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case......