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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In this "intelligently talky, properly claustrophobic chamber piece,' Rooney Mara plays a woman who confronts the man who sexually abused her when she was a girl. -
Judi Dench returns to the role of Queen Victoria — this time in her dotage — for Stephen Frears' film about the monarch's eyebrow-raising friendship with a young Indian man (Ali Fazal). -
The writing/directing debut of Hallie Meyers-Shyer (daughter of Nancy Meyers) features tired tropes, stiff acting and lots of hand-wringing about how tough it is to break into Hollywood. -
Directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha (who also directed and co-wrote Bend it Like Beckham) this crowd-pleasing, gently revisionist period drama examines the last days of British colonial rule. -
Once it trades rote ballerina-training cliches for ecstatically shot sequences of hip-hop choreography, this French film, like its main character, comes alive. -
A Jersey girl dreams of rap stardom in this "conventional dramedy" that highlights star Danielle Macdonald's charisma but reduces other characters to types. -
In director Marc Webb's indulgent coming-of-age tale, a young Manhattan writer believes the world revolves around him. Unfortunately, the film believes the same thing. -
A gay man saunters through the French countryside, pursued by his lover, in this loose meditation on the perks and pitfalls of hooking up. -
This sweetly funny tale of a recently widowed Orthodox Jew struggling to care for his son offers a humane and sympathetic view of life in a Hasidic enclave. -
In this unsentimental, unflinching, increasingly harrowing film, a young woman in Victorian England internalizes the various cruelties visited upon her ... until she doesn't.
