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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Live by Night
    Centred on an uxorious guy who is building a gambling palace, Live by Night invites unfortunate comparisons with Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic "Casino," in which the hero is tortured by his dishonest business and his unstable wife. Of course, Affleck isn’t Robert De Niro – delivering what was probably the last great dramatic role of his career – and Chris Messina as Coughlin’s rather bland sidekick most definitely isn’t Joe Pesci.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Darkest Hour
    Wright's Darkest Hour is filled with many lush examples of the pathetic fallacy, which doesn't totally disguise the awkward truth that this is a film mainly about meetings.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Kate Taylor
    Beast
    The charming Johnny Flynn ultimately struggles to find the right tone for the boyfriend, not helped by a director who hasn’t quite mastered the rhythm required for his surprise ending.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Kate Taylor
    Hamnet
    [Buckley's] all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Glass Castle
    The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Program
    The Program makes passing references to the power of celebrity and the Live Strong narrative – the cyclist admits to telling people what they wanted to hear – but it never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.
    • 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Intern
    It’s only mildly entertaining, never funny enough nor smart enough to summarize the cultural moment in the manner of a "Working Girl" or "The Social Network."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    All My Puny Sorrows
    An icy Sarah Gadon can’t plumb it, offering a quietly mannered performance where a beautifully furrowed brow and occasional tear suggest the character cares more about looking elegant than dying. Thankfully, in the warmer roles of Yoli and her resilient Mennonite mother, Alison Pill and Mare Winningham do find the big broken heart at the core of this story.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Silence
    For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Murder on the Orient Express
    Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Crazy Rich Asians
    As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Grinch
    A critic needs only two words to dispense with The Grinch; the first one is bah.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Huntsman: Winter's War
    Unlike the smarter "Maleficent," a revisionist Sleeping Beauty created by the same producers, what The Huntsman series lacks is any intriguing psychology.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    A Hologram for the King
    This time, Tykwer somehow manages to turn Eggers’s attempt at an era-defining story into a weird little cross-cultural comedy with romantic overtones while remaining largely faithful to the original plot and dialogue. Here, globalization’s economic devastation is just a nice backdrop for some amusing – and, thankfully, inoffensive – observation of one American abroad.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    A Bad Moms Christmas
    Yes, it's up to the older generation to provide the comedy here, and they do it fairly consistently, with the delicious Christine Baranski carrying most of the movie as Amy's mom.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Book of Henry
    This story soon turns excessively maudlin.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Generation Wealth
    Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Cars 3
    The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Only the Brave
    It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Julieta
    It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Sunset Song
    It’s ripe to the point of bursting and, with a plot that tilts to melodrama, Davies flirts dangerously with cliché, creating an over-wrought period piece where every wheat field is bathed in golden sunlight and every childbirth is announced by chilling screams.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Never Look Away
    As Kurt finds his true art in the West, thanks to the help of a fictional version of Joseph Beuys, the film turns gripping, but it ultimately reduces art appreciation to the autobiographical.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Girl on the Train
    Whatever the locomotive power of the novel, this film adaptation only limps into the station.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Goodbye Christopher Robin
    We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Kung Fu Panda 3
    From a sympathetic perspective, let me say that sequel No. 3 shows how difficult it is to keep these franchises fresh while remaining true to their initial charm.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    Bombshell
    Ambivalent and tepid as it attempts to fashion a tick-tock thriller from Ailes’s downfall.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Kate Taylor
    The Assassin
    Every scene is perfectly framed, every symbol lovingly shot, but the story and the characters remain opaque.
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