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 2007, filmmaker John Maloof bought thousands of undeveloped negatives at an auction. Now, he and Charlie Siskel present Finding Vivian Maier, a film about the reclusive woman behind the photos.
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Co-workers in a Chicago brewery teeter on the edge of romance in this mumblecore-ish film starring Olivia Wilde (Thirteen from House M.D.). Even a trip to Costa Rica and copious amounts of beer can't animate a rambling plot.
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The comedy Austenland rightly pokes fun at Americans' ideas about the British, says critic Ella Taylor. She says the line between high and low culture in England has always been a bit hazy.
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The only virtues of this lumbering farce are those of the much livelier novel from which it's adapted. Critic Ella Taylor says an affectionate needle in the side of the Jane Austen industry — and the hordes of Darcy-mad Americans it caters to — has become a clunky, tone-deaf broadside.
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What are you left with when you peel away all the cheerful elements of the rom-com genre? I Give It a Year — a semi-serious story about two newlyweds slogging through their first year of marriage.
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Perseus "Percy" Jackson, the dyslexic New York City-born son of Poseidon, returns for a second round of mythologically inspired mayhem in Sea of Monsters.Critic Ella Taylor says Rick Riordan's young-readers franchise makes for perfectly enjoyable summer-film fodder. (Recommended)
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Inspired by a real-life Belgian tragedy, Our Childrencenters on a manipulative father who has made his family prisoners to a kind of domineering benevolence. (Recommended)
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Two documentarians remember a time when Jewish comics could count on the resorts of the Borscht Belt to provide a proving ground — and an informal curriculum — as they pushed to find a broad audience without abandoning their roots in vaudeville and Yiddish theater.
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Woody Allen's latest is a by-the-numbers number — though it may very well be redeemed by a dynamic Cate Blanchett as a damaged woman poised between stasis and hysteria.
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A new Kristen Wiig vehicle is a likable but warmed-over comedy about reconnecting with the whack-job family you thought was holding you back. Critic Ella Taylor says Wiig's characterization of the title character is a whit too familiar to be much of a win.