Ella Taylor
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 83% | Borg Vs. McEnroe (2018) |
Smoothly crafted, satisfyingly earnest...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2018
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| 87% | You Were Never Really Here (2018) |
Style overwhelms substance; characters recede into a fog of endless setup accentuated with Johnny Greenwood's meaningfully strident score.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2018
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| 60% | Ismael's Ghosts (Les fantômes d'Ismaël) (2018) |
Multiple meanings are Desplechin's bread and butter and the fertile terrain of his mostly wonderful films. Like Ismael, though, he seems to have lost the thread that will tie together his stories and generate something for us to chew over.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 22, 2018
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| 96% | The Death of Stalin (2018) |
Though The Death of Stalin is a one-joke movie about how plotting and pandemonium invariably pour into a leadership vacuum, it's a deadly serious joke that we'd do well to attend to.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
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| 51% | Submission (2018) |
It's an age-old fable about the point where desire meets device, and invariably loses.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2018
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| 82% | Early Man (2018) |
Among its abundant delights, Early Man doubles as Park's sly statement about his own process, which may seem exceedingly crude and outdated, but has the warmth and personality of a homemade, hand-crafted production.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
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| 81% | The Party (2018) |
Janet and her bickering guests come across as cartoon bourgeois, thinly-drawn and wooden in their line delivery like dummies of a ventriloquist bent on caricaturing a privileged elite ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
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| 100% | 2018 Oscar Nominated Shorts - Live Action (2018) |
This year's crop of Academy Award-nominated live action shorts - several of them made as newbie filmmakers' calling cards - make up in earnest humanity for what they lack in technical sophistication.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2018
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| 58% | Please Stand By (2018) |
Please Stand By deflates into a perfectly watchable but soft parable in which a can-do young American loses a battle, only to win the war of growing up, while the adults in the room confront their own unhelpful rigidities.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2018
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| 21% | Forever My Girl (2018) |
The problem is not the well-worn plot or familiar characters, but the fact that Wolf adds no depth or complication to either that would make the film her own.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2018
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| 98% | In Between (2018) |
There's little sense of grievance or victimhood here, only a liberating anger and a sharp but empathic intelligence that pops up in unexpected places.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2018
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| 80% | Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017) |
Bening's expert runs up and down the emotional register leave no room for doubt about Grahame's charisma even when she's playing her own worst enemy.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 28, 2017
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| 78% | All the Money in the World (2017) |
It's Williams' tightly wound, calculating performance that juices the movie's thrill ride of a last hour, and turns it into a revelation.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2017
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| 78% | Sweet Virginia (2017) |
What sets Sweet Virginia above the pack is a leisurely inquiry into the moral rot that seeps into the very bones of lives bent out of shape by disappointment, frustration, loneliness or the absence of love.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 16, 2017
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| 57% | Murder On The Orient Express (2017) |
"Can we please stop with the remakes of Murder on the Orient Express?" I ask upon exiting Kenneth Branagh's fatally tepid new reading of the Agatha Christie classic.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2017
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| 76% | Last Flag Flying (2017) |
This antic, heartfelt dramedy about the many wounds of war handily shows off the director's abiding delight in illuminating character through banter; it simultaneously beams a light into critical American moments past and present.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 2, 2017
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| 99% | God's Own Country (2017) |
A former actor himself, Lee directs his leads with subtle assurance.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 26, 2017
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| 91% | Human Flow (2017) |
Human Flow leaves us wondering what will become of this lost generation, stranded without home or schooling or work, if or when they run out of hope and turn to anger or despair.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 13, 2017
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| 76% | Una (2017) |
Una is an inquiry into the complicated bond between a predator and his prey. Yet Harrower does not play monsters and victims.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2017
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| 66% | Victoria & Abdul (2017) |
The stories don't quite mesh, but somehow it all works.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2017
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| 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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| 71% | 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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| 83% | 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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| 82% | 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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| 33% | 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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| 97% | 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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| 89% | 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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| 90% | 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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| 74% | 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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| 86% | 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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| 75% | 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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| 90% | 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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| 97% | 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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| 96% | 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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| 97% | 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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| 63% | 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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| 84% | 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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| 42% | 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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| 73% | 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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