Ella Taylor

Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
The Atlantic,
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul,
Film Comment Magazine,
L.A. Weekly,
Los Angeles Times,
New York Times,
Village Voice,
NPR.org,
NPR
Critics' Group:
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
Movie Reviews Only
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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89% | Wolke Neun (Cloud 9) (2008) |
Cloud 9 is most moving when it steps quietly into the gap between physical decline and the persistence, at full blast, of unfulfilled longing and desire. - NPR
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| Posted Sep 23, 2020
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88% | Selah and the Spades (2020) |
A YA gangster movie that doubles as a soulful meditation on the beauty and danger of power, when all means justify the end of retaining that power. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 16, 2020
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57% | Resistance (2020) |
Marceau truly was a hero who carried his sadness into his work, and Resistance is an honorable, absorbing homage to the making of a man and his art. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 26, 2020
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99% | Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) |
Hittman is powerfully attuned to the unquestioning solidarity and indomitable moxie of teenaged girls, the wordless ways in which they fight and make up... - NPR
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| Posted Mar 12, 2020
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90% | The Booksellers (2020) |
[A] delightful homage... - NPR
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| Posted Mar 5, 2020
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48% | Greed (2020) |
Cunningly mounted to satirize the heavy-breathing structure of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Greed is a jaunty caper littered with farcical flashbacks... - NPR
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| Posted Feb 27, 2020
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93% | Ordinary Love (2020) |
Unlike most others of its kind, this one trusts us to stick with the slew of treatments that often hurt more than the disease. In its cheekily Irish way it offers a portrait of a great and enduring love under acute pressure. - NPR
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| Posted Feb 13, 2020
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92% | The Assistant (2020) |
Without resort to a single scene of graphic sexual violence, Green nails down the awful truth that Jane's exploitation is part and parcel of a silent but systemic abuse of powerless and vulnerable women. - NPR
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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91% | Weathering with You (2020) |
Shinkai may be dipping his toes in his own pre-tested global market. But Weathering With You rises gracefully above its copycat blueprint... - NPR
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| Posted Jan 16, 2020
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93% | Invisible Life (A vida invisível de Eurídice Gusmão) (2019) |
Traducing genuine suffering as mere histrionics (even the scaling of a fish becomes an excuse for violence), Aïnouz unnerves and alienates where he might illuminate. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 19, 2019
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68% | Little Joe (2019) |
Effectively creepy... - NPR
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| Posted Dec 5, 2019
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98% | 63 Up (2019) |
What's striking is not just the sturdy durability of family and community, but the fundamental decency of just about every participant in this long cultural experiment. - NPR
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| Posted Nov 27, 2019
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95% | A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) |
Even if you think Rogers' psychological model is simplistic, you can't help but climb aboard. - NPR
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| Posted Nov 22, 2019
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58% | Frankie (2019) |
Sachs builds a physical world so relentlessly clean, classy, and gorgeous it teeters on the edge of travelogue. But he fails to people it with characters we could care much for or about, so busy are they shilling for banal observations on life. - NPR
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| Posted Oct 24, 2019
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97% | Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019) |
Performing at his mature finest, Banderas moves up and down the emotional register from mournful to puckish to regretful to freshly hopeful with a restraint that dials down Almodovar's breathy melodrama almost to straight realism. - NPR
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| Posted Oct 3, 2019
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87% | Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019) |
Flamboyant, terrifying, and pointedly timely... - NPR
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| Posted Sep 19, 2019
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83% | Before You Know It (2019) |
Wise, witty, and richly specific in its evocation of a family limping along on a wobbly foundation of secrets and lies. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 29, 2019
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83% | Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) |
Just when you're ready to agree with Brügger's disclaiming admission that he's a lousy journalist and storyteller, the trail runs cold. Only then does the story roar back to sinister life, while the telling turns solemn. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 15, 2019
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92% | David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) |
Passionate, wry, often bellicose, but always a candid and pithy storyteller... Crosby often seems to be writing his own self-lacerating obituary. - NPR
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| Posted Jul 18, 2019
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79% | Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019) |
Marianne Ihlen doesn't steer this moving, sympathetic, but ultimately frustrating tribute. Perhaps inevitably, Cohen does, via Broomfield's fascination with the singer's tortured relations with the many women he romanced. - NPR
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| Posted Jul 5, 2019
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92% | Wild Rose (2019) |
Buckley has bags of pugnacious charisma and a soaring, throaty singing voice tempered with enough vulnerability to make us want to hold her close even as the screw-up she offers us drives everyone in her orbit up the wall. - NPR
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| Posted Jun 20, 2019
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92% | The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) |
The Last Black Man is a sequence of undeniably lovely grace notes that don't always cohere. Yet the movie is held together by the progress of Jimmie's conflict with himself... - NPR
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| Posted Jun 6, 2019
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79% | Photograph (2019) |
The action - if that's what you call two people wandering around Mumbai - unfolds with the slow, intimate rhythms of classic Indian cinema, lightly juiced with the goofy high spirits and populist common touch of Bollywood. - NPR
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| Posted May 16, 2019
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35% | Poms (2019) |
Even by the elastic standards of mass-market escapist trifles the creators of POMS might consider the challenges of growing old and confronting death without infantilizing both characters and audience. - NPR
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| Posted May 9, 2019
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87% | Non-Fiction (Doubles vies) (2019) |
Non-Fiction is a mostly delightful, occasionally exhaustingly word-drunk comedy of manners larded with giddy farce. - NPR
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| Posted May 2, 2019
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96% | Hail Satan? (2019) |
A richly entertaining new documentary on the Satanic Temple's exploits from director Penny Lane, who has become one of our foremost chroniclers of bizarro Americana. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 18, 2019
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95% | Little Woods (2019) |
A modest but intensely empathetic first film by writer-director Nia DaCosta. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 18, 2019
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71% | Teen Spirit (2019) |
It's Fanning... who retains the sweetness of this heavily-trodden teen fable without ever tipping it over into cloying goo. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 11, 2019
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93% | Diane (2019) |
Jones fills her existential space with a bracing, though never unfeeling, inquiry into what it feels like to confront the steady drip of accumulating pain, and loss, and no longer being needed as we age. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 28, 2019
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60% | Sunset (Napszállta) (2019) |
Nemes can be relentlessly opaque, which at time makes the film a drag to follow. But there's method in his determination to leave us with nowhere to park our own affinities. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 21, 2019
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57% | The Hummingbird Project (2019) |
At its best The Hummingbird Project is a parable about failure, but one that ultimately undercuts itself with redeeming goo. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 14, 2019
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72% | All Is True (2019) |
In this lovely ode to a literary master, Branagh shows us what his hero always understood - that life may be an endlessly unfolding mystery, but in art, all is true. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 20, 2018
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63% | Mary Queen of Scots (2018) |
Mary Queen of Scots does make a powerfully moving case for an uneasy dance between two powerful women hamstrung by male politics. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 6, 2018
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91% | Sicilian Ghost Story (2018) |
[An] intensely atmospheric melodrama... - NPR
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| Posted Nov 29, 2018
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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
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| Posted Nov 9, 2018
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80% | 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
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| Posted Nov 1, 2018
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No Score Yet |
Feels like the stretched-out short student film that it is. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Oct 19, 2018
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86% | 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
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| Posted Oct 18, 2018
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86% | 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
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| Posted Sep 27, 2018
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74% | 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
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| Posted Sep 13, 2018
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60% | 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
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| Posted Aug 30, 2018
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56% | 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
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| 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
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| Posted Aug 2, 2018
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96% | 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
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| 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
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| Posted Jul 5, 2018
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97% | 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
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| Posted Jun 28, 2018
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84% | 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
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| Posted Jun 14, 2018
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97% | Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) |
I'd be his neighbor in a heartbeat. - NPR
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| Posted Jun 7, 2018
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32% | 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
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| 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
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| Posted May 24, 2018
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