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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Frank Langella is an aging, stoic patriarch determined to end his life in this uneven but effective cross-country comedy-drama.
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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.
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The latest film by writer/director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) is a brutally frank meditation on polymorphous carnality in rural southern France.
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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.
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Director Pablo Larrain digs beneath the poetry to offer a warm, humorous and revealing biopic of Pablo Neruda, neatly avoiding the genre's tendency to lionize its subjects.
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Pedro Almodovar brings his lush visual exuberance to this adaptation of three Alice Munro stories marked by spare, interior struggles. The odd fusion results in a surprisingly quiet, somber film.
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Director Damien Chazelle follows up Whiplash, his 2014 study in musical masochism, with a romantic musical full of catchy ditties and vibrant colors.
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In this rigorously observed French drama, Isabelle Huppert delivers a searing performance. "In Huppert," says critic Ella Taylor, "deadpan meets tumult wreaking havoc within."
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A sharp-tongued young woman weathers the sundry mortifications of teenage life in a film from first-time writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig.
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Director Verhoeven gleefully courts controversy with this bitterly sardonic film about the aftermath of a woman's violent rape.