Kate Taylor

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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 276 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kate Taylor's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Silent Land
Lowest review score: 12 Joy
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 183 out of 276
  2. Mixed: 68 out of 276
  3. Negative: 25 out of 276
276 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    The BFG
    The movie trots pleasantly along, but it never races.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Game Night
    The overall results are unusually wholesome – and satisfyingly funny. Game Night is the kind of harmless comedy you rarely see these days, as happily entertaining as a good game of Pictionary.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Mary Poppins Returns
    With strong performances in a scheme of both sensible updates and clever revivals, Mary Poppins Returns is as impressive as the 1964 version it joyfully recalls – except in one key area.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Only Tudyk’s dry humour in the role of the tactless droid K-2S0 makes Edwards’s darkly reductivist approach occasionally seem smarter rather than lesser. In the end, this hardening of the franchise seems likely to alienate both the fans and the uninitiated.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    It's a decidedly odd, down-beat story and yet, if the sexes were reversed, we would think nothing of a young woman swapping the role of lover for that of nurse when her much-older partner fell ill.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Last Flag Flying
    It simultaneously operates as a symbol of the tension between private life and patriotic duty that is at the core of the man's disagreement with the military.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Other Side
    In the end, the power of Minervini’s pseudo-fiction gives way to a much blander version of pseudo-reality.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Maudie
    The heart and mind of Maudie are always in the right place.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    In the Fade
    Mainly the film is a tightly focused and tightly filmed neo-noir, as the script, which Akin co-wrote with Hark Bohm, neatly picks off parents and friends to leave Katja isolated enough to make her desperate actions believable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Bombshell
    Ambivalent and tepid as it attempts to fashion a tick-tock thriller from Ailes’s downfall.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Miss Sloane
    Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    Unfortunately, the actual confrontations this project must have caused happen off camera, but the story of a determined quest is always enlivened by insights into the clawing animals, bizarre monsters and sinful humans that populate Bosch’s fantastical visions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Everest
    There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat. Take it or leave, Everest is just there.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Café Society
    Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    Cumberbatch excels once again at breathing life into a sorrowful genius.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Denial
    As her adversary, the ghastly Irving, Timothy Spall is excellent, creating a man of great insecurities hidden behind blustering self-confidence. The actor is happily willing to manufacture a thoroughly oily and dislikeable figure as he and Jackson successfully balance their villain on the knife edge of caricature.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Solo: A Star Wars Story
    The heavy Star Wars legacy sits lightly on Ehrenreich’s shoulders in a Disney-Lucasfilm movie that is finally having fun.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Good House
    If you can ignore an ending ripped straight from the AA playbook, there’s minor fun to be had along the way.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Maya
    Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Kate Taylor
    The Bookshop
    Coixet occasionally overplays her hand – a dropped headscarf, a sudden death – as does a constipated Bill Nighy in the role of the reclusive widower who is Florence’s one ally, but overall, the film is stealthily impressive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Destroyer
    Director Karyn Kusama shifts dexterously between the present and the past, unspooling a satisfyingly twisted piece of storytelling by writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who succeed in making both plots gripping. Kudos to Kidman for taking on an ugly role (both physically and morally) and for giving both versions of the character a convincing hardness.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    Seven Veils
    The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    The Secret Life of Pets
    If children will be entertained by the unwilling roommates’ narrow escape from cats, dog catchers and the Flushed Pets, it is the mass of surrounding detail, from the glittering Manhattan skyline and Gidget’s sleek modernist pad to the animals’ remarkable mastery of domestic technology, that will impress the adults.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    The Sense of an Ending
    Batra has drawn delicate performances from his ensemble in this adaptation of what was always an elliptical novel, but as a film, The Sense of an Ending leaves you hungry for something more than just the sense of an ending.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Ocean's 8
    Bullock is firm as the preternaturally self-assured Debbie but little more than that; her performance as the con artist is reined in so tightly that she only finally appears to be having some fun when she gets to don a blond updo and German accent on the night of the ball.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    The Man Who Invented Christmas
    Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Kate Taylor
    SPECTRE
    A Bond movie is all about delivering on expectations: to enjoy it you have to be pleased rather than frustrated by its predictability. In that regard, Spectre, Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as Bond and the second directed by Sam Mendes, can be deemed a solid success: not as darkly stylish as "Skyfall" but not as stupidly grim as "Quantum of Solace" either.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Mary Queen of Scots
    Perhaps you can accuse all historical fiction of presentism, the sin of applying contemporary values to historical events. Why does the past interest us if not for the comparisons it provides with the present? But with the example of "The Favourite’s" wittily anachronistic romp through the 18th-century court of Queen Anne so fresh at hand, it is hard not to judge the earnest Mary Queen of Scots for its ignorance of the problem.
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