Charles Taylor has written on movies, books, popular culture, and politics for the New York Times, Salon, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dissent, the Nation, the New York Observer, Lapham's Quarterly, and others. A member of the National Society of Film Critics, Taylor has contributed to several of the society's volumes, and his work appears in Best Music Writing 2009. He has taught journalism and literature courses at the New School, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. Taylor lives in New York.
A day when you can read a long, meaty, brilliant new essay by Charles Taylor cannot be a bad day. -- A. O. Scott A terrific film critic ... His writing packs soul in a Greil Marcus sort of way. -- Dwight Garner An influential and compulsively readable film critic ... He called it like he saw it, often employing the sorts of provocative turns of phrase that spark arguments in parking lots ... Such vivid commentary affords readers a pathway into movies. Slant Magazine Movie criticism's Dostoyevsky, Charles Taylor scribbles notes from the underground of suburban basements in the Seventies, when Americans could barely tell anymore the subversive from the square. In forgotten semi-classics like Cisco Pike and cult stars like Lee Marvin ('an almost subterranean actor'), charting heretofore unseen connections between Faye Dunaway and Mick Jagger, Taylor reveals a national identity forged from the innocence we claim to have lost but never had in the first place. -- Steve Erickson, author of TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, ZEROVILLE, and SHADOWBAHN Charles Taylor's impassioned exploration of the underside of '70s cinema is blunt about the flaws of these films but utterly persuasive about their value. This is provocative, informed, richly contextualized cultural criticism for readers to revel in, learn from, laugh with, and argue about. -- Mark Harris, author of PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION and FIVE CAME BACK Reading Charles Taylor's Opening Wednesday is like looking in a mirror--in this case the mirror of such officially celebrated 1970s movies as The Godfather and Mean Streets. You see yourself in unfamiliar but dimly recognizable clothes that, you swear, aren't your own: slept in, utilitarian, garish, tasteless, and yet somehow beckoning, like a repressed memory. As you pass through this book, whether you know the movies Taylor dives into or not, you'll find that the book casts its own shadows: you have to see these pictures, right now. -- Greil Marcus