Charles Taylor

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Salon
For 379 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 63% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Charles Taylor's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 54
Highest review score: 100 McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Lowest review score: 0 Speed 2: Cruise Control
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 141 out of 379
  2. Mixed: 141 out of 379
  3. Negative: 97 out of 379
379 movie reviews
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    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Some Like It Hot
    If Some Like It Hot isn’t the funniest movie ever made, you can’t blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder’s 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long. Where most comedies wear out their audience after an hour and a half, “Some Like It Hot” goes on for 122 minutes and leaves you ebullient.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Yi Yi
    Quietly overwhelming.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    This has to be one of the most completely realized comedies ever made, and, in its odd way, one of the most civilized.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    The movie haunts you like a ballad whose tune you remember but whose words hang just beyond reach. And like listening to a ballad, we know the outcome of the events we're watching was foretold long ago, but we're helpless to do anything but surrender to the tale.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Band of Outsiders
    Band of Outsiders is about the tyranny of living a life of movie-fed fantasies, and while it makes us see the poverty of those fantasies, it also makes them unaccountably rich, poetic, sad.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    It’s no news to anyone that “E.T.” is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It’s also a greater picture than we could have known. [2002 re-release]
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Man Who Would Be King
    The triumph of the movie isn't just Huston's realization of a longtime dream to bring the Kipling story to the screen but the way he both honors classical movie tradition and brings it forward into a new era.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Beau Travail
    Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Punch-Drunk Love
    Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Capturing the Friedmans
    Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Y Tu Mamá También
    One of the most joyous movies I've ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Small Time Crooks
    The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda doesn't create the simultaneous sense of being destroyed and exalted that the greatest humanist movies do, but he's stayed true to his title.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    To Be and to Have
    This heart-wrenching documentary about a French village schoolteacher at work offers the comedy and pathos of great drama and the visual magnificence of painting.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    No one could have held The Fog of War wanting if Morris had concluded that it's impossible to get all the way to the bottom of Robert McNamara. But explicating an enigma is not the same thing as blurring it with artistic ambitions. The thickest fog in this documentary has been conjured not by McNamara, but by Errol Morris.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Boogie Nights
    Moore, who may be the most unpredictably talented actress in movies right now, plays Amber with an inseparable mixture of maternal feeling and lust that's flabbergasting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Straight Story
    And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Apostle
    This little knockout of a movie, written and directed by Robert Duvall -- who also plays the title character, a roving Texas evangelist -- can strike you in the same way that Bible stories did when you first encountered them as a child.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Before Night Falls
    As good as it is, Before Night Falls might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The Pianist
    The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Hero
    One of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Out of Sight
    What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Men in Black
    Behind its mask of deadpan goofiness, it's a friendly, clever picture, one that doesn't feel untouched by human hands. And at an hour-and-a-half, it doesn't wear out its welcome.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Local Hero
    Local Hero is as sweet and loving as movies get. But it's also about as off-kilter as they get, too.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Trainspotting
    The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    When We Were Kings
    When We Were Kings, which was put together by Taylor Hackford and Leon Gast, is a patchy movie that fails to rise to the grace and articulation of its main attraction. But it has Ali, and when he's on-screen, that's enough.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Lilya 4-Ever
    Not without its own bleak integrity. But the movie wipes you out and leaves you with nothing, not even the feeling of exaltation that can be present in the most tragic works of art.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    There's no doubt that Kill Bill is an epic, and no doubt of the skill that's often apparent. But what it leaves us with is awesomely trivial.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Read My Lips
    It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.
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