Ella Taylor
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 50% | Postcards From London (2018) |
McLean's nostalgia for the Soho of Francis Bacon, Freud, and Jarman (all of them clear influences on his own work) is touchingly wistful about the ravages of time, and he's serious about probing the mixed blessings of sex, art, beauty and authenticity.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2018
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| 85% | Boy Erased (2018) |
Boy Erased... smoothly handles the tonal shifts between absurd and sinister as the film slides between Jared's past and present struggles.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 1, 2018
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| 59% | Face (2002) |
Feels like the stretched-out short student film that it is.‐ L.A. Weekly
Posted Oct 19, 2018
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| 88% | What They Had (2018) |
Chomko refreshes the formula with vividly grounded writing that never forces her actors to summarize where they've been, emotionally speaking, or where they're going.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 89% | All About Nina (2018) |
The movie is carried by Winstead's mesmerizingly mercurial performance, and not just because she does pitch-perfect impressions of, among others, Kristen Stewart and Werner Herzog.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 27, 2018
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| 70% | The Children Act (2018) |
Characters move through their posh habitats, explaining what they've done, are about to do, should have done years ago. Their confusion is fine; the fuzziness of the filmmaking less so.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2018
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| 59% | Operation Finale (2018) |
It's in the movie's lengthy middle sequence of verbal sparring between Malkin and Eichmann that Operation Finale comes into its own.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2018
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| 54% | The Bookshop (2018) |
Coixet has a lyrical sense of place, and she has made a charming, well-acted adaptation that ably conjures visual pleasure out of the written word...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2018
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| 86% | The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) |
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a sharply observed study - with a knife edge of satire, for sure - of the daily practice of soft tyranny by people not gifted with healthy self-doubt.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2018
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| 95% | Dark Money (2018) |
There's not a dull or dry moment in Reed's briskly paced film about the secret assault on the American electoral and judicial process by corporations whose agenda is nothing less than the dismantling of government itself.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 12, 2018
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| 88% | Whitney (2018) |
For all the domestic sturm und drang, it's the blossoming of Houston's musical sensibilities that most engages in the film.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 5, 2018
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| 96% | Three Identical Strangers (2018) |
The film is an artfully constructed investigative narrative structured to give us the sense of discovering, along with the boys and their families, several layers of buried secrets and lies that blighted their adult lives.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 28, 2018
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| 81% | Gabriel and the Mountain (Gabriel e a montanha) (2018) |
Barbosa tracks the feverish ups and downs of his friend's journey through his charming, maddening character.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 14, 2018
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| 99% | Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) |
I'd be his neighbor in a heartbeat.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2018
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| 26% | Rodin (2018) |
Not since Jacques Rivette's magnificent La Belle Noiseuse (1991) has a film zeroed in on creative process with the same obsessive care it devotes to the artist's volatile love life.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 31, 2018
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| 100% | Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993) (2018) |
The result is a kind of grief procedural, its focus sharpened by the lush greens of the Catalan landscape.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 24, 2018
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| 69% | The Seagull (2018) |
The Seagull, true to its author, turns life into art that's bold enough to ask, "How shall we live?" and brave enough to answer, "With great difficulty."‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 10, 2018
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| 86% | Tully (2018) |
What saves the movie from unbearable smugness is the lovely duet of Theron and Davis playing their deepening partnership without either posturing or a disclaiming wink at the audience.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
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| 86% | Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) (2018) |
Let the Sunshine In moves between dialogue and carnal interludes with rhythmic fluidity. The mostly nocturnal settings and sumptuous black and red palette intensify Binoche's soulful sensuality.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2018
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| 84% | Borg Vs. McEnroe (2018) |
Smoothly crafted, satisfyingly earnest...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2018
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| 89% | 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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| 51% | 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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| 80% | 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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| 65% | 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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| 24% | 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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| 78% | 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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| 97% | 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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| 75% | 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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| 81% | 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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| 33% | 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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| 72% | 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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| 32% | 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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| 89% | 4 Days in France (Jours de France) (2017) |
Mesmerizing ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 95% | 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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