Ella Taylor
Ella Taylor's reviews (from any publication) always count toward the Tomatometer
because this critic is a Tomatometer-approved critic.
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 82% | Brad's Status (2017) |
Brad's Status offers usefully excruciating insights into the wild swings between hubris and self-laceration that fuel our daily efforts to solidify a coherent self.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2017
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| 32% | Home Again (2017) |
Less a story than a collection of awkwardly mounted run-throughs building toward amiable foregone conclusions, Home Again chugs home huffing and puffing about the difficulties of breaking into Hollywood when you're young and talented.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2017
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| 70% | Viceroy's House (2017) |
At the end of this sprawling, passionate but generously non-partisan epic, a moving coda reveals the director's personal stake in telling the story her way. You should stay for the credits.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 31, 2017
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| 84% | Polina (Polina, danser sa vie) (2017) |
Polina springs to vivid life as a winsome hip-hop ballet.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 24, 2017
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| 83% | Patti Cake$ (2017) |
For all its jittery attitude and outsider milieu ... the movie is too bent on pleasing crowds to cohere into a point of view.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2017
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| 30% | The Only Living Boy in New York (2017) |
If you liked Webb's enormously popular but, to this critic's mind, horribly pandering (500 Days) of Summer, you'll probably enjoy this too.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 88% | 4 Days in France (Jours de France) (2017) |
Mesmerizing ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 96% | Menashe (2017) |
Menashe is full of lovely grace notes in which nothing much happens, but which deepen our understanding of this self-segregated corner of the world.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 27, 2017
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| 88% | Lady Macbeth (2017) |
Scene for increasingly horrifying scene, Lady Macbeth is about the making of a psychopath for whom bullying and betrayal have become learned behavior.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 14, 2017
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| 91% | Marjorie Prime (2017) |
Whether someday soon we will all need our own Primes is one of the questions this likable but slightly anodyne movie raises yet doesn't really run with...Almereyda, expertly juggling the tonal shifts between mordant and elegiac, keeps the faith.‐ Film Comment Magazine
Read More | Posted Jul 11, 2017
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| 100% | Swim Team (2017) |
Swim Team is long enough to break and warm your heart in equal measure - which is about what you'd expect from a documentary about teenagers with autism who are training to compete in the Special Olympics.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 6, 2017
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| 96% | The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2017) |
Clocking in at a trim 76 minutes, The B-side is as warmly affectionate as its subject, a close friend and neighbor of the director.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 78% | The Beguiled (2017) |
Coppola's The Beguiled doesn't so much negate the festering male paranoia as reclaim the point of view for the women it targets. Then she bats the premise around like a graceful cat with an addled mouse in its paws.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 77% | Beatriz at Dinner (2017) |
A love story that restores agency to a woman who has lost all, and asks us to take a hard look at our own.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 8, 2017
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| 85% | Band Aid (2017) |
At its best, Band Aid ... carries us along with Anna and Ben's rocky ride through mourning the loss of youth, with its absolutist faith that there's a life code to be cracked, upon which a door will swing open to blissful ever after.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 1, 2017
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| 74% | Wakefield (2017) |
Swicord ... both respects the material and neatly corrals it for her own purposes.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 18, 2017
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| 86% | The Wedding Plan (2017) |
"You have a nutty energy," one bemused prospect tells Michal, and that is generally true of this brightly colored, often zany crowdpleaser with sharply written dialogue and a pop soundtrack.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 88% | One Week and a Day (Shavua ve Yom) (2017) |
Resolutely non-psychological and spare with its sharply funny dialogue, One Week and a Day apprehends its walking wounded through their mood swings, their half-assed lurches into elaborate plans we can tell they'll never complete.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 27, 2017
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| 50% | The Promise (2017) |
What The Promise lacks in subtlety and sophistication, it makes up for in the visceral potency of its imagery.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2017
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| 91% | A Quiet Passion (2017) |
Filmmaker and subject are a match made in heaven that, cohabiting in Davies' delirious head, gives histrionic a good name.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2017
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| 98% | Your Name. (Kimi No Na Wa.) (2017) |
Your Name is a stirring tale of rescue with a boisterous edge of YA mischief. It's also a love story with a swoony romantic affinity for the age-old tussle between chance and fate.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 95% | Karl Marx City (2017) |
As much an inquiry into the mechanics of how autocratic regimes work as it is a search for the truth about one citizen's tragic end in its clutches.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2017
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| 96% | After the Storm (Umi yori mo mada fukaku) (2017) |
Watch and listen closely ... and worlds of deeply felt, awkwardly expressed passion will unfold in and around a cramped apartment in a nondescript high-rise that has aged along with the inhabitants who raised families there.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 74% | The Sense Of An Ending (2017) |
If The Sense of an Ending is an object lesson in the heedless cruelty of the young, it's also, in Broadbent's versatile hands, a moving account of the inner turmoil of a man with little time left to right a wrong.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 9, 2017
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| 36% | Wolves (2017) |
A modestly pleasing, unsurprising indie about a family undone by anger issues.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 2, 2017
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| 65% | As You Are (2017) |
The setup is common enough, but though you can check off the usual ingredients in what follows - sex, drugs, a glance at Kurt Cobain - this is the furthest thing from a social-issue teen drama.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 23, 2017
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| 83% | A United Kingdom (2017) |
This enormously satisfying story honors the smiling, courageous couple we see in a photo behind the closing credits.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 9, 2017
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| 45% | Youth in Oregon (2017) |
Langella's tightly controlled stillness makes Ray's tantrums far less potent than the grim stoicism with which he faces his physical indignities, and his quiet domination of a family that's barely holding it together.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2017
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| 43% | Gold (2017) |
We've been here many romps before, and one wishes that for once, someone would make a film on this subject without making the obligatory sharp turn into folksy, facile populism that Gold and its ilk inevitably do.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 26, 2017
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| 71% | Staying Vertical (Rester vertical) (2017) |
Staying Vertical propels us on a careening ride from eros to thanatos, the creative/destructive urges that lurk beneath a slim veneer of civilization.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 19, 2017
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| 41% | 100 Streets (2017) |
Elba oozes charisma and intelligent physicality even when on his knees snorting a line of coke ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 12, 2017
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| 94% | Neruda (2016) |
As in all his movies, Larrain is an expert juggler of tones: by turns antic and lyrical, Neruda is shot with a dark, nocturnal beauty and a mournful orchestral score.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 29, 2016
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| 82% | Julieta (2016) |
Munro writes stark prose in blues and greys; Almodovar pumps up the volume with breathy dialogue, bathing his beleaguered women in brilliant vermilions and electric blues.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 22, 2016
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| 92% | La La Land (2016) |
La La Land is a full-service throwback to the Golden Age musical, transposed with lashings of romantic melancholy to a contemporary Los Angeles decked out in primary-colored plumage.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 8, 2016
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| 100% | Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016) |
A marvelous slow burn of domestic drama ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 1, 2016
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| 95% | The Edge of Seventeen (2016) |
Craig writes fresh, sharp dialogue, knows what she's doing around actors and is unafraid to get out on a ledge.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 17, 2016
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| 91% | Elle (2016) |
A provocateur to his core, Verhoeven wades breezily into hot-potato territory, all the while refusing moral judgment.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 10, 2016
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| 89% | Loving (2016) |
Loving is modest, quiet, and deep. Like all Nichols' work with his long-time cinematographer, Adam Stone, the film highlights the lush beauty of the rural American South.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 3, 2016
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| 98% | Moonlight (2016) |
By the end, you may long for a fourth chapter.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 20, 2016
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| 93% | Certain Women (2016) |
From her terrific debut feature River of Grass through Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt has given us incomplete, quietly suffering women who feel their way into change.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 13, 2016
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| 93% | Blue Jay (2016) |
Paulson is way overdue for a lead role, and though Blue Jay is minor fare ... it's a great vehicle for her to run up and down the emotional scale without breaking a sweat.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 6, 2016
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| 90% | A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove) (2016) |
This modest dramedy, deftly directed by Hannes Holm from the best-selling novel by Fredrik Backman, is as sweetly sincere as it is market-driven, with gusts of saving black comedy rolling in to rescue it from excess goo.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 29, 2016
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| 94% | Sand Storm (Sufat Chol) (2016) |
This emotionally intelligent first feature offers a sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the tangled skein of inequalities that entrap women (and the men they love and resent) in a Bedouin village.‐ Variety
Read More | Posted Sep 27, 2016
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| 100% | The Ruins of Lifta (2016) |
The Ruins of Lifta offers a muscular example of ability of documentaries to make the political intensely personal. More painfully, it's also a case study in the limits of benign intention.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 22, 2016
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| 76% | Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) |
Zellweger has precision comic timing, her British accent is close to flawless, and she's having a great time.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2016
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| 77% | London Road (2016) |
Once you get used to the film's most potent strategy ... it takes on the cadence of hypnotic poetry, a Greek chorus that picks out a billowing unease that only begins to spread following a trial verdict that was meant to bring closure.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 8, 2016
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| No Score Yet |
The tales in Dekalog conduct a mesmerizing dialogue with God and science, with free will and fate, with the many ways in which indifference or cruelty echo and repeat down the generations.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 1, 2016
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| 62% | Madeline (1998) |
This pleasant but pedestrian live-action film has one great thing going for it in the shape of Hatty Jones, a tiny Brit with currant-bun eyes full of forthcoming transgression.‐ L.A. Weekly
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2016
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| 76% | Buffalo '66 (1998) |
For a study in untrammeled lunacy, the movie is a highly constructed and tightly controlled work.‐ L.A. Weekly
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2016
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| 48% | Complete Unknown (2016) |
Like Alice, the film seems to be making itself up as it goes along, which would be fine with a less expository script than the one Marston wrote with Julian Sheppard, and with fewer showy gestures at the surreal.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2016
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