Ella Taylor

Errol Morris' unusually straightforward documentary about portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman is as charming as its sunny, voluble subject.

Sofia Coppola's lush visual aesthetic infuses this study in sublimated lust with just enough sly, Southern-Gothic bodice-ripping to intrigue and satisfy.

Director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White collaborate on a film featuring Salma Hayek as a healer who finds herself at a very uncomfortable meal.

Zoe Lister-Jones and Adam Pally star in an ambling but insightful comedy about a couple that uses music to stop fighting.

Bryan Cranston plays a man who settles in to spy on his own family in Wakefield, a story with roots going all the way back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Critic Ella Taylor loved this "beautiful and beguiling" tale of a Tel Aviv woman determined to let God provide her a last-minute groom.

They've lost their son. The shiva is over. Now, Eyal (Shai Avivi) and Vicky (Jenya Dodina) "veer off on separate tracks of crazed non-coping" says critic Ella Taylor.

Director Terry George's historical drama about three people swept up in the 1915 massacre of Armenians lacks subtlety and sophistication, but features powerful, visceral imagery.

Filmmaker Terence Davies has found his ideal subject with this Emily Dickinson biopic, and a fiery performance by Cynthia Nixon challenges notions of the poet as a dour recluse.

Critic Ella Taylor says this quirky love story "shimmers with the magic of a fairy tale" yet "has its feet firmly planted on the ground of Japan's past and present."

A filmmaker returns to the former East Germany to uncover family secrets and explore how life behind the Berlin Wall traded on civilian informants and an insidious collective obedience.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama about a stalled writer's attempts to make peace with his extended family is a quiet and meticulously wrought character study.

An unsparing, unsentimental Julian Barnes novel gets a straightforward treatment — and a tacked-on, falsely redemptive ending — in Ritesh Batra's film.

Critic Ella Taylor admires the performances, but says director Bart Freundlich's latest is a "modestly pleasing, unsurprising indie about a family undone by anger issues."

An intimate portrait of high school friends caught up in the aftermath of a violent incident places us inside their heads with sensitivity and restraint.

Director Amma Assante's film about the backroom gamesmanship that led to the birth of a new African nation grows "vigorous and sharp" once it gets past its lead characters' cliche-ridden courtship.

Frank Langella is an aging, stoic patriarch determined to end his life in this uneven but effective cross-country comedy-drama.

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.

The latest film by writer/director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) is a brutally frank meditation on polymorphous carnality in rural southern France.

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.