Elley was a music critic in the 1970s and 1980s, and authored the annual International Music Guides. In 1986 he published
Dimitri Tiomkin: The Man and His Music in conjunction with the National Film theatre. In 1977 he published
World Filmography with Peter Cowie, and began authoring the annual Movie Guides for
Variety from the 1990s. He co-founded the Udine
Far East Film Festival and was its artistic director for the first three editions, starting in 1999. In 2013,
Routledge published his
The Epic Film: Myth and History, a detailed insight into the making and history of epic films. In it, he refers to
Ben Hur (1959) as the "zenith of the Hollywood cycle". With his expertise in Asian cinema, Elley has been outspoken on several topics, and has been critical of misogyny in
Tsai Ming-liang's films. Since 2015, he is publishing his new texts as well as re-publishing the old ones on his personal website,
Sino-Cinema, amassing a total of 1050 reviews of Chinese-language films as of 11 April 2020. ==References==