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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This slyly subversive revisionist take on an infamous Australian outlaw presents the burnished popular myth and a darker, brutal and tragicomic take alongside one another. -
Set at an elite, ethnically diverse boarding school, Tayarisha Poe's first feature is "a YA gangster movie that doubles as a soulful meditation on the beauty and danger of power." -
Writer-director Eliza Hittman's tale of a traumatized teen (Sidney Flanigan), who travels to New York for an abortion is best when it hews closest to her point-of-view. -
Makoto Shinkai's latest animated feature doesn't live up to his hit Your Name, with which it shares many plot similarities. But it speaks to anxieties about climate change in a captivating way. -
Marielle Heller's new film isn't Fred Rogers' story — it's the story of two damaged outsiders (Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys) finding a connection that overcomes the darkness in their childhoods. -
In A.J. Eaton's documentary, Crosby proves a "passionate, wry, often bellicose" storyteller who "often seems to be writing his own self-lacerating obituary." -
This "moving, sympathetic but ultimately frustrating tribute" to Marianne Ihlen inadvertently reveals the male gaze's narrow focus by defining this complicated woman as Cohen's passive muse. -
Director Karyn Kusama has a history of films where women fight back. But Destroyer, despite its transformation of Nicole Kidman, fails to develop a compelling story to support that transformation. -
Two films now in theaters — The Tribes of Palos Verdes and Lady Bird — feature contentious mother-daughter relationships that inspired critic Ella Taylor to reflect on her own. -
Errol Morris' unusually straightforward documentary about portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman is as charming as its sunny, voluble subject.
