Ella Taylor
Ella Taylor's reviews (from any publication) always count toward the Tomatometer
because this critic is a Tomatometer-approved critic.
| Publications: | The Atlantic, City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Village Voice, NPR.org, NPR |
| Critics' Group: | Los Angeles Film Critics Association |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 74% | 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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| 76% | 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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| 84% | 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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| 87% | 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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| 92% | 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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| 73% | 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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| 39% | 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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| 69% | 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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| 40% | 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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| 83% | 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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| 93% | 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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| 90% | 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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| 92% | 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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| 47% | 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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| 82% | Indignation (2016) |
Though Schamus is a seasoned, respectful adapter of Roth's prose, it's just plain hard, if not impossible, to do full justice to the novelist's mercurial shifts between irony, knockabout farce, regret and outrage.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 28, 2016
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| 45% | Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (2016) |
Willfully or not, the director misses one opportunity after another to pull back and assess.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 14, 2016
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| 93% | Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) (2016) |
The movie bestows a forgiving compassion on all its troubled souls, even those of the misbehaving dead.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jul 7, 2016
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| 71% | Our Kind of Traitor (2016) |
For all its blather about honor and courage the movie doesn't really go anywhere with its inquiry into the new evil.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 30, 2016
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| 77% | Wiener-Dog (2016) |
Solondz gives no quarter, nor does he mince words about where we're all headed. His vision of our predicament is bleakly funny and weirdly heartfelt.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 23, 2016
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| 78% | Argentina (Zonda: folclore argentino) (2016) |
Minor but highly watchable ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 16, 2016
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| 51% | Genius (2016) |
Perkins' gifts are clearly on display, but the movie asks us to take Wolfe's brilliance on trust. That's a fatal weakness.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 9, 2016
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| 91% | The Witness (2016) |
At its sharpest, The Witness is a careful inquiry into the tricks memory plays, and into how ambiguous events get reshaped into narratives that fit individual and collective needs.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Jun 2, 2016
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| 82% | Chevalier (2016) |
The stakes remain infantile, the black humor never flags, but the competition takes on a sinister savagery as bro-bonding alliances shift and hero-worship curdles into betrayal and resentment.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 26, 2016
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| 85% | Maggie's Plan (2016) |
Though Miller is a bit lighter on her feet here than in some of her other movies, Maggie's Plan doesn't clip along smartly enough for screwball. In the end, there just isn't enough chemistry to go round ...‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 20, 2016
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| 81% | Sunset Song (2016) |
Every rustling leaf and rustling cornstalk, every drop of rain pounding on stone, every tear of tissue paper, is lovingly drawn out.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 12, 2016
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| 97% | Dark Horse (2016) |
It's true that Dark Horse relies a bit too heavily on commercial race footage. Yet the movie grows into uplift of a whole other kind.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 5, 2016
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