Ella Taylor

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L.A. Weekly, NPR, Variety, Village Voice
For 948 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ella Taylor's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 I'm Going Home
Lowest review score: 0 Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 573 out of 948
  2. Mixed: 310 out of 948
  3. Negative: 65 out of 948
948 movie reviews
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 85 Ella Taylor
    A Royal Affair
    While it's lavish and lush in all the expected costume-drama ways, A Royal Affair never bogs down in period detail. What drives the film, along with great acting, is the appetite of director Nikolaj Arcel and his boisterous co-writer Rasmus Heisterberg ("I want a fun queen!" wails Christian) for the queasy workings of political gamesmanship both above and below board.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Ella Taylor
    Shattered Glass
    Far and away the strongest performance in Shattered Glass is Peter Sarsgaard’s.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Ella Taylor
    Notes on a Scandal
    Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Ella Taylor
    Road to Perdition
    Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    Comes as close as perhaps any film has gotten to approximating the inner life of an artist.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Stone Reader
    To anyone whose soul lives or dies by reading or writing or both, the movie is a total thrill, and not just as a debate on the nature of the one-shot writer or the decline of publishing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    In the House
    In the House is often mordantly funny. Luchini is France's master of deadpan comedy: When he does farce, it carries an undertow of sorrow, and vice versa.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Aimee & Jaguar
    A sophisticated and beautiful feature debut.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Ella Taylor
    Seabiscuit
    Two-thirds of the way through, Seabiscuit awakes to its duties as a perfectly presentable race movie, rising to a crescendo of satisfying --- if somewhat gaga -- inspiration.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Ella Taylor
    Mulan
    Mulan, like all the characters in this movie, is a cookie-cutter American prototype, lazily ripped off from the Disney boilerplate that fashioned Pocahontas et al.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Ella Taylor
    Passion of Mind
    It's hard to imagine a movie at once more pandering and insulting to adult women
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Ella Taylor
    Let It Rain
    Jaoui's insights into the human struggle to find meaningful ways to live may not be especially profound, but she brings a warm particularity and a tough but tender compassion to her studies of congenital human discontent and the crazy, often self-defeating ways in which we strive to complete ourselves. If that's bourgeois, we might all plead guilty.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    The Tunnel
    Director Roland Suso Richter gives a raw, frank but sophisticated account of the excruciating logistics of this great escape, and the appalling, inspiring blend of betrayal and courage that attended the group's herculean efforts.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Ella Taylor
    The Mother
    The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Nowhere in Africa
    The movie's real strength lies in its intelligent, sympathetic account of the dynamic, difficult marriage of Regina's parents.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Ella Taylor
    Big Miracle
    Big Miracle is a family movie fitted with the usual appeals to multiple audiences, and though tots, teens and younger parents might find the action a little slow until the rescue pressure builds, the grandparents will enjoy it as a trip down media memory lane.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Ella Taylor
    The Woodsman
    Overblown melodrama, as muddle-headed as it is palpably sincere.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Ella Taylor
    Bringing Out the Dead
    (Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Ella Taylor
    Walk the Line
    An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Ella Taylor
    Control
    What the movie lacks is a point.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Ella Taylor
    Amer
    The pleasures of this gorgeous, clever, and visceral film are almost exclusively aesthetic. Those unmoved or alienated by the porn of pain may be left flopping as nervelessly as one of the movie's severed limbs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Ella Taylor
    Match Point
    Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    The Talent Given Us
    A painful, hilarious and immensely moving rumination on mid-life angst.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 85 Ella Taylor
    The Silence
    What you'll carry away is the film's austere sympathy for the struggles of its benighted characters and its bleak conviction that justice and resolution mostly happen in movies.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Paradise Now
    Abu-Assad, who made the lovely 2002 film "Rana's Wedding," is a far more gifted observer of the everyday than he is an action director, which is why, in Paradise Now, he productively sidetracks into a persuasive and often very funny portrait of the irrationalities of life under occupation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Ella Taylor
    Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Even the “good” Holocaust stories are chased by heartbreak, as we learn from this straight-ahead documentary.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Ella Taylor
    Inspector Bellamy
    Inspector Bellamy is dedicated to the memory of two famous Georges: the drily ironic singer Brassens, and Georges Simenon, whose crime novels go for the jugular of bourgeois France - and dig deep into the black hearts of those who, just when they imagine they have hit bottom, can always sink lower.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Ella Taylor
    Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Despite its Scottish scenery and period frocks, Madden's film proves a pallid creature indeed compared to the hanky-panky leaking out of Buckingham Palace of late.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Ella Taylor
    The Treatment
    A feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Ella Taylor
    The Water Horse
    Personally, I wouldn’t take a toddler (unless he was the son of Tarantino) to this intermittently, legitimately terrifying tale of a boy and his Loch Ness monster. But everyone else should blow off "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and show up for the best kiddie picture of the season -- and, along with "Ratatouille," of the year.
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