Ella Taylor
Ella Taylor is a freelance film critic, book reviewer and feature writer living in Los Angeles.
Born in Israel and raised in London, Taylor taught media studies at the University of Washington in Seattle; her book Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Post-War America was published by the University of California Press.
Taylor has written for Village Voice Media, the LA Weekly, The New York Times, Elle magazine and other publications, and was a regular contributor to KPCC-Los Angeles' weekly film-review show FilmWeek.
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Critic Ella Taylor says this quirky love story "shimmers with the magic of a fairy tale" yet "has its feet firmly planted on the ground of Japan's past and present." -
A filmmaker returns to the former East Germany to uncover family secrets and explore how life behind the Berlin Wall traded on civilian informants and an insidious collective obedience. -
Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama about a stalled writer's attempts to make peace with his extended family is a quiet and meticulously wrought character study. -
Critic Ella Taylor admires the performances, but says director Bart Freundlich's latest is a "modestly pleasing, unsurprising indie about a family undone by anger issues." -
An intimate portrait of high school friends caught up in the aftermath of a violent incident places us inside their heads with sensitivity and restraint. -
Director Amma Assante's film about the backroom gamesmanship that led to the birth of a new African nation grows "vigorous and sharp" once it gets past its lead characters' cliche-ridden courtship.
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Frank Langella is an aging, stoic patriarch determined to end his life in this uneven but effective cross-country comedy-drama. -
Matthew McConaughey gained weight and lost hair to throw himself into this tale of a real-life stock-market swindle. The film aches for us to admire his reckless, grasping selfishness; we don't. -
The latest film by writer/director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) is a brutally frank meditation on polymorphous carnality in rural southern France. -
Idris Elba stars in a London-set ensemble drama our critic calls "soapy, rote stuff," but it's representative of the new generation of filmmakers taking Britain's multiracial society as their subject.
