Ella Taylor

No weddings

I've Loved You So Long: Kristin Scott Thomas' Monster Mom

Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely Fabulous. Thomas has mischief in......
Gone with the tractor trailer; Credit: Steve Crell

Moving Midway: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Southern myths rise up, then drop like flies in the enthralling documentary Moving Midway, and all because director Godfrey Cheshire’s cousin is moving house. Literally. If it were only about the mind-boggling logistics of lifting Charles Hinton Silver’s antebellum ancestral home near Raleigh, North Carolina, off its august foundations —......

The Secret Life of Bees: Buzz Kill

A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil-rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the crossover......
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Sacreligulous: Bill Maher's Cross to Bear

On a Friday evening in a studio on the CBS lot just north of the Fairfax Farmers Market, Billy Martin is warming up the audience for a taping of Real Time With Bill Maher, due to air later that night. The crowd is mostly middle-aged white men and women, with......
Wedding crasher: Hathaway as grade-A emotional terrorist; Credit: Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Rachel Getting Married: Anne Hathaway Plays the Other Sister

Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the......
All about Georgiana; Credit: Peter Mountain

The Duchess: Royally Screwed

The Duchess is the best women’s movie of the summer. Don’t get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and The Women set the bar so dismally low that almost any film with a dame in it who doesn’t channel her identity only through buying, boogying or bedding is......
Plastic city; Credit: Claudette Barius

The Women: Ladies Light

"What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the 14-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake Cukor’s......
The conjugal bed

Momma's Man: Mikey Likes It

Pudgy, owlish and vague around the edges, Mikey (Matt Boren) looks nothing like the son of an avant-garde filmmaker, let alone one as charismatically rumpled as Mikey’s father. Then again, maybe Mikey, a 30-ish Los Angeles resident who’s visiting his parents in New York City, looks exactly like the son......
Tough economy: Upham and Leo make ends meet

Frozen River: A Hard-Knock Life

When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went......

the Man Who Didn’t Love Women

The mercurial spirit and gnomic intellect of Isaac Bashevis Singer are properly difficult to trap in a bottle, but German director Jan Schütte comes as close as any in this atmospheric, exhilaratingly ambitious chamber piece that weaves the great Yiddish writer’s life and obsessions with three of his seminal stories......