AltWeeklies Wire
'The Kite Runner' Doesn't Flynew
Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster's flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan's misery under serial totalitarian rule.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
12-14-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Marc Forster, The Kite Runner
Knocked-up Knockoutnew
Tart of tongue and sweet of disposition, Juno offers living proof that crisp writing, graceful directing and an abundantly poised young lead can perk up a premise that’s been bludgeoned to death.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
12-07-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Juno, Jason Reitman
Tamara Jenkins Keeps It Realnew
Coming almost 10 years after Slums of Beverly Hills, her new movie, The Savages, mines a difficult time in Jenkins' early 30s, when she saw both her grandmother and her father succumb to senility.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
12-04-2007 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages
Savage Lovenew
Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of choosing a nursing home in her new film, The Savages, and jacks it up a few notches by asking what it's like to care for a demented father who never cared for you.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
12-04-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages
'Starting Out in the Evening': Intelligent Designnew
If Starting Out in the Evening is a movie about how little we know and how much we presume, it is also about transformation, and heartbreak and halting renewal.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
11-26-2007 |
Reviews
'Mr. Magorium': Small Wondernew
Like most Christmas movies, Mr. Magorium's stocking comes stuffed with PSAs (albeit well-written ones, by the spiritless current standards of the genre) alerting children to what they of all people already know.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
11-16-2007 |
Reviews
Bad Things Happen to Bad People in 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead'new
That sly old elf Sidney Lumet opens his new movie with a sexual encounter you might associate with a man spending his frustration on a compliant hooker.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
11-02-2007 |
Reviews
Little Children in the Moviesnew
My 9-year-old daughter's interest in boys is largely confined to whether she can outrun them, and yet she has acquired a precise, if mercifully abstract, grasp of the contemporary arts of seduction.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
11-02-2007 |
Movies
Tilda Swinton: The Ice Queen Meltethnew
Though Swinton's career has taken a decided turn for the commercial these days, I still think of her as the intimidating eminence rouge in the elliptically stylized Jarman films that launched her career, or the ornately costumed androgyne in Potter's Orlando, or even the frigid witch in Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
11-02-2007 |
Profiles & Interviews
Playing Down on Her Luck, Amy Ryan's Star Risesnew
"I hope people ask me, 'Where did you find that local actress?,'" Ben Affleck told Amy Ryan when he cast her as a wreck of a single mother in his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
10-26-2007 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone
Ordinary 'Rendition'new
It's not torture, but this latest Mideast thriller is as conventional as they come.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
10-19-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Gavin Hood, rendition
'Sleuth': Better Home and Gardennew
But not much else in Kenneth Branagh’s remake.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
10-12-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Kenneth Branagh, Sleuth
A Dark-Skinned Good Guynew
Tall, slender and elegant in a charcoal-gray leather jacket and neatly trimmed chin stubble, Ashraf Barhom is an Israeli Arab making his Hollywood debut as the righteous Saudi Arabian who sets an example of personal and professional heroism in The Kingdom.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
10-02-2007 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Peter Berg, The Kingdom
The Many Freckled Faces of Catherine Keenernew
Keener plays Jan, a slackly conceived and overly familiar character, but she brings the role a warmth, specificity and diffuse sadness that makes you wish she had a lot more screen time.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-24-2007 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Into the Wild, Sean Penn
Paul Haggis' Latest is Worth Seeing Despite His Heavy Handnew
What makes In the Valley of Elah -- a wildly uneven but brave foray into the dark side of posttraumatic stress disorder -- unusual is its focus on parental grief, which Haggis seeks to complicate by asking, What's the one thing that could be worse than the bottomless sorrow of losing a child who’s a war hero?
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-17-2007 |
Reviews
Tags: Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah
