Ella Taylor

Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be ... while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down,......

I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir......

Along its winding road to crucifying the American judiciary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired — which aired to mostly warm reviews on HBO a few weeks ago and begins a theatrical release from THINKFilm this Friday — grinds some very blunt axes, makes some dizzying leaps to judgment and does......

In Hancock, a peculiar and occasionally charming poke in the ribs of the superman myth, Will Smith plays the rudest, smelliest superhero America has ever seen. Cursed with the physical elegance and urbanity of a Cary Grant or a Denzel Washington, Smith looks like an underdressed movie star even with......

As part of the Russian promotional campaign for Universal’s big-budget summer action picture Wanted, director Timur Bekmambetov and his team unleashed on the Internet a two-minute video featuring a manager laying waste to his office. Kevin Scanlon (Click to enlarge) Night Watch man: Timur Bekmambetov “Over the next few days,......

George Kraychyk/Paramount Pictures (Click to enlarge) Talk with the hand: Mike Myers, wise guy. Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little bit too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a......

Just over a decade ago, Russian director Sergei Bodrov made his mark in the West with his Academy Award–nominated movie Prisoner of the Mountains, which transplanted a Tolstoy children’s novella to Russia’s war with Chechnya. Here at L.A. Weekly, we liked the movie enough to put the relatively unknown director,......