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Ella Taylor

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Movie Reviews
3:59 pm
Tue April 23, 2013

'At Any Price': What Cost A Win?

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Credit Hooman Bahrani / Sony Pictures Classics
They might look like team players, but Dean (Zac Efron) and his ambitious father (Dennis Quaid) have markedly different goals for the future of their expanding family farm — and the people who run it.
Credit Hooman Bahrani / Sony Pictures Classics
Dean's desire to be a professional NASCAR driver divides his family and wins the support of his girlfriend, Cadence (Maika Monroe), and mother, Irene (Kim Dickens).
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Originally published on Thu April 25, 2013 4:29 pm

Like last year's fracking drama Promised Land, the new movie At Any Price is about farm people getting pushed around by corporations — except that there's no Matt Damon to rescue them, cleanse his soul and snag Rosemarie DeWitt in the bargain.

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Movie Reviews
4:23 pm
Thu April 18, 2013

A 'House' Divided, Over Stories Lived And Told

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Credit / Cohen Media Group
Bored high school English teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) encourages a talented student to exploit a classmate's family for literary inspiration.
Credit Cohen Media Group
Claude (Ernst Umhauer, left) insinuates his way into the daily life of his classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughett), using the latter's family as fodder for a revealing series of essays and short stories.
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Originally published on Fri April 19, 2013 2:38 pm

Among the semi-literate journals submitted by his high-school students, jaded French literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is jazzed to find a rough diamond from a new pupil, Claude (Ernst Umhauer).

In weekly installments, the ingratiating but enigmatic teenager, who looks as though he just stepped out of a Pasolini movie, chronicles his efforts to insinuate himself into the family of one his classmates, an amiable but awkward underachiever named Rapha (Bastien Ughetto).

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Movie Reviews
4:03 pm
Thu April 11, 2013

A Class-Concious Romp With 'The Angels' Share' Of Charm

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Credit Entertainment One
An unsuspected talent gives Robbie (Paul Brannigan, third from left) a chance to pull off a rather unlikely heist. (Also pictured: Jasmin Riggins, William Ruane and Gary Maitland.)
Credit Entertainment One
Director Ken Loach is known for stern films analyzing the effects of class division in his native United Kingdom, but his latest offering is almost lighthearted in tone.
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Responding to the death of Margaret Thatcher earlier this week, film director Ken Loach told The Guardian: "Mass unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed — this is her legacy. She was a fighter, and her enemy was the British working class."

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Movie Reviews
4:03 pm
Thu April 4, 2013

'Before And After' Dinner, Andre Is Still Talking

Credit Cinema Guild
In his wife's new documentary, theatrical director Andre Gregory comes across as an eternal child, hooked on his capacity to enchant but rarely able to listen to anyone else.
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Originally published on Fri April 5, 2013 6:27 pm

In 1981, avant-garde theater director Andre Gregory collaborated with his friend Wallace Shawn and French filmmaker Louis Malle on an oddball project they called My Dinner with Andre.

Now enshrined as a classic — and one of the most-lampooned films in the history of American cinema — the movie is a talky two-hander in which Gregory (or someone very like him) gassed away about his globe-trotting adventures in spiritual enlightenment, while Shawn (or someone very like him) listened in disbelief, then grew entranced.

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Movie Reviews
4:03 pm
Thu April 4, 2013

Past Pains, Buried Deep 'Down The Shore'

Credit Transmission Pictures
The mysterious Jacques (Edoardo Costa, left) upends Bailey's (James Gandolfini) life when he arrives in the latter's seaside New Jersey town in Down the Shore.
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If you want to tell a story, the professional tale-spinners say, make something happen.

That's true, but a happening can be defined as elastically as the teller needs it to be. Sometimes it's a shift in a character's inner landscape — a change in her responses to the common hurts and losses that she's lugged around from childhood — that moves us more than a third-act gunshot ever could.

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Ella Taylor is a free-lance 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.