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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Director Jason Reitman re-teams with Junoscripter Diablo Cody for a film about an overburdened mother and her nanny that's "a little bit funny, a bigger bit cruel, and with it all, oddly moving." -
In this delightful French tale, Juilette Binoche plays an amorous, tart-tongued artist. Filmmaker Claire Denis seems to have created "a fresh sub-genre: the looking-for-love comedy procedural." -
This "smoothly crafted, satisfyingly earnest" film features many sports-movie clichés, but digs a bit deeper to find psychological affinities between the two very different athletes. -
Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) directs Joaquin Phoenix in this violent, strident and repetitive tale about a man who sets out to rescue a kidnapped girl. -
French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin can't hold the thread of the story he seeks to tell, so this film about the mysterious return of an old lover fades into frustrating ambiguity. -
Armando Iannucci directs this lacerating, frenetic dissection of the power vacuum left by Stalin's death. The director "never overtly winks at current parallels East or West. He doesn't have to." -
Based on the Francine Prose novel Blue Angel, this tale of a writing professor's affair with a precocious student is bound to "usefully ruffle feathers" by refusing to take sides. -
Writer-director Sally Potter zeroes in on the hypocrisy of the British chattering-class but her aim wanders, so the characters stay flat and the satire never kicks in. -
This year's nominees include a sobering and deeply personal drama about the impact of an infamous lynching and a light farce that probes the divide between psychiatrist and patient. -
Dakota Fanning plays a young woman with autism determined to submit her Star Trek script to a screenwriting competition in this disappointingly soft coming-of-age tale.
