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Film Feature

Incredible Shrinking Women

The mainstreaming of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

By Ella Taylor

Published: March 5, 2008

For an obscure tale of a virginal London governess who discovers her true calling running interference for a giddy nightclub singer, the 1938 English novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has...

Film

Blood Money

The Counterfeiters is a morally ambiguous Holocaust tale of survival and collusion.

By Ella Taylor

Published: February 27, 2008

Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters , a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly...

Film

Teen Comedy Charlie Bartlett Could Use a Dose of Mean

By Ella Taylor

Published: February 20, 2008

Like most wannabe heroes of eager-to-please teen comedies, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully...

Night&Day;

Blood Money

By Ella Taylor

Published: February 20, 2008

When an Austrian filmmaker who makes no secret of the fact that his grandparents were Nazi sympathizers makes a fact-based movie (nominated by the Academy for best foreign film) about a Jewish...

Film

The Spiderwick Chronicles a Fearsomely Funny PG Netherworld

By Ella Taylor

Published: February 13, 2008

Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One's fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol' Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The...

Film

More Adventures in Gangsterland

In Bruges, Martin McDonagh's sightseeing hit-men flick, isn't much of a trip

By Ella Taylor

Published: February 6, 2008

No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell's eyebrows with a tweezer. His black, fluffy, glorious unibrow still isn't the prettiest thing about In Bruges — that...

Film

Under the Knife

One very bad day in Ceausescu's Romania

By Ella Taylor

Published: January 30, 2008

The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days , more comfortably known as "that abortion movie that won this year's Palme d'Or," sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama...

FilmCap

Caramel

By Ella Taylor

Published: January 30, 2008

The multiply blessed young Lebanese writer-director Nadine Labaki looks sublimely like Anna Magnani crossed with Penelope Cruz. Labaki also has the brass and the chops not only to direct her first...

Feature

Hit List

The top movies of 2007

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 26, 2007

It's that time of year again. Our six critics don't always (or often) agree, but we've combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15)...

Feature

Support Group

The year's best characters

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 26, 2007

Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so...

Film

Savage Love

Testing the limits of familial bonds, one nursing-home application at a time

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 19, 2007

Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism "uncharted territory" is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell...

Film

Grounded

Controversy aside, The Kite Runner just won't fly

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 12, 2007

Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster's flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of...

Film

Intelligent Design

PYT seduces her literary hero in the astute Starting Out in the Evening

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 12, 2007

In Starting Out in the Evening , a new film by Andrew Wagner, a pneumatic graduate student spreads honey over the face of the elderly New York novelist she's trying to seduce. Later, the two will...

Film

Sorry State of Affairs

Ian McEwan's Atonement, now as a bodice-ripper

By Ella Taylor

Published: December 5, 2007

Rereading Ian McEwan's Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride and Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago...

Film

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium Not That Wonderful

By Ella Taylor

Published: November 14, 2007

Midway through the amiable children's movie Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium , there comes a speech that I'll wager writer-director Zach Helm had been saving for future use ever since he discovered...

Film

Dull Roar

The odd upside of Robert Redford's terribly earnest, quite terrible war drama

By Ella Taylor

Published: November 7, 2007

Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn't even written by...

Film

Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth Remake Relies on Caine's Black Comedy

By Ella Taylor

Published: October 17, 2007

Before he snagged the lead in Joseph L. Mankiewicz' 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer's 1970 stage play Sleuth , Laurence Olivier had, with his customary diplomatic finesse, dismissed the...

Film

Torture Flick Rendition' Makes Us Water-Bored

By Ella Taylor

Published: October 17, 2007

Late in Rendition , in case you've been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret...

FilmCap

Lars and the Real Girl

By Ella Taylor

Published: October 17, 2007

How painful to watch Ryan Gosling, one of the most elastic actors of his generation, smirk and gawp and grimace his way through Craig Gillespie's smarmy little number about a pudgy Midwestern...

Film

'Across the Universe': Help!

Run for your life if you can, little girl: Julie Taymor's '60s-set musical is a bust

By Ella Taylor

Published: September 12, 2007

After Hair , Hairspray , and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the '60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class, and race through...