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 11.8 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Sideways
    Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.
    • 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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Honey
    There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.
    • 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
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    Million Dollar Baby
    A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, Million Dollar Baby tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.
    • 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
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    About Schmidt
    Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Calle 54
    Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."
    • 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
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Spider-Man 2
    For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Vera Drake
    When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Girls Can't Swim
    It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Memento
    Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.
    • 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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Sum of All Fears
    Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    A Simple Plan
    Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Station Agent
    It's hard to say why The Station Agent sends you out feeling so benevolent. It may have something to do with being in the presence of a director who treats you with respect. McCarthy allows us to feel without telling us how and what we should feel.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Friday Night Lights
    There's some good acting in this mess.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Songcatcher
    Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    The General
    The General may be the most intimate and matter-of-fact of Boorman’s films. Movies like Deliverance and Excalibur revealed Boorman as a master of scope. The General, which is one of his masterpieces, proves the depth at which he’s working.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Love and Death on Long Island
    With Love and Death on Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski makes a very pleasing feature debut.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    On the Ropes
    Walking out of the theater, I felt so bereft that I couldn't speak. And it doesn't hurt any less thinking about the movie now, as I write this.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    In the Company of Men
    A singularly unpleasant movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Monsters, Inc.
    It's a nice movie. But Disney has never learned that "nice," especially in comedy, is a negative virtue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Two Family House
    The epitome of the small, character-driven film that the indie movement was supposed to champion before it became a hip mirror of the Hollywood star system.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Hotel Rwanda
    A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai Ming-Liang's new movie about urban isolation reinvents the delicate, poetic shadow play of silent movies.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    The People vs. Larry Flynt
    "Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Affliction
    Affliction is a harsh experience, but the harshness isn't a matter of punishing the audience or of the director, Schrader, showing off his toughness: That unvarnished harshness is the very essence of the material.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Never less than witty, charming, accomplished.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Run Lola Run
    Potente pumps strong and true from the first frame to the last.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    The Thin Red Line
    The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Magnolia
    None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Last Orders
    Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Panic
    A small movie, to be sure, but it's also a thoroughly original one.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Ratcatcher
    A large part of the movie's problem is that both the characters and the actors who portray them serve as vehicles for Ramsay's stylistic flourishes.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Big Red One
    Fuller was never a poetic director, but in The Big Red One he finds what in himself was closest to lyricism. Fuller's movie is like flowers thrown on a battlefield in remembrance, and it makes the overblown war movies that have followed seem like cheap and tatty Veteran's Day poppies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Donnie Brasco
    You wouldn't mistake Donnie Brasco for a great movie or an important one, but it's something that's become almost as rare in American movies: a consistently absorbing and intelligent adult entertainment.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Butterfly Effect
    It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    Our Song
    One of those movies that you continue to pull for even after it becomes clear that it isn't very good.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Monsoon Wedding
    Monsoon Wedding is going to be a big art-house hit because it's one of those movies that reassures audiences that people in other countries are just like us.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    In America
    Jim Sheridan's miraculous In America, a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Morning Sun
    The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing Morning Sun is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    A Very Long Engagement
    The holiday season's best movie so far.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Iris
    Suffers from PBS syndrome, but Dame Judi Dench cures with a moving portrayal of life with Alzheimer's.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Last of the Mohicans
    The Last of the Mohicans is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it’s vintage Hollywood. It’s also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying adventure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    State and Main
    At its best, State and Main is fast and sharp, but when a movie like this goes off the rails, it's more disappointing than when a bad movie does.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Man on the Train
    Watching Man on the Train is like coming across one of those threadbare Persian rugs you see on public tours of private homes. Its elegance is more comfortable than cold, and it carries its worn, battered mien proudly.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Girl on the Bridge
    Shot in sumptuous black-and-white by Dreujou, Girl on the Bridge might just be the most beautiful-looking movie of the year.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Charles Taylor
    Loser
    The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Bulworth
    As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Boxer
    In some ways, this is the most conventional of Sheridan's movies. But it never feels sentimental because of the grittiness of his approach.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Bring It On
    Unexpected late-summer treat.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Catch Me If You Can
    Well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 20 Charles Taylor
    The Believer
    A bad movie -- really a terrible movie -- with a daring idea behind it. And it's had the sort of crummy luck that, no matter what you think of it, can get you steamed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Sea Inside
    There's a combination of fatalism and hard-edged humor at work in The Sea Inside that you can imagine Irish writers would feel right at home with.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Charles Taylor
    Joe Gould's Secret
    Carefully made, respectful and dull.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Kundun
    Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Judy Berlin
    An almost perfectly realized poetic vision of people who continue in their everyday existence certain that life in a larger sense has passed them by.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    Splendor in the Grass
    Like nobody else, Kazan succeeded in capturing the overheated, self-pitying dramatization so near and dear to the teenage heart.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Charles Taylor
    The Limey
    An art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    Show Me Love
    Isn't a good movie. It's drab, visually ugly and a little pokey...but the two heroines are so recognizable as real girls, and the young actresses who play them are so appealing, that you keep rooting for these kids.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Bourne Supremacy
    As a piece of craft, and with the exception of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," it's miles beyond any studio film this summer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Spider-Man
    What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Last Life in the Universe
    Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Charles Taylor
    L.I.E.
    Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    Titanic Town
    In some ways it's not a very good movie... tries to mix comedy and tragedy...but the movie has an exciting subject -- a true story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    Erin Brockovich
    Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Charles Taylor
    The Faculty
    It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Charles Taylor
    The Company
    Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Charles Taylor
    The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Charles Taylor
    Ray
    What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.
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