Sarah-Tai Black

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Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 83 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 45% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Sarah-Tai Black's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Dahomey
Lowest review score: 25 Emilia Pérez
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 48 out of 83
  2. Mixed: 28 out of 83
  3. Negative: 7 out of 83
83 movie reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Zodiac Killer Project
    What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Much like its predecessors, Bloodlines joyfully relishes in its Rube Goldbergian kills and thrills, often trading on the absurd humour of its own fashioning.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Sarah-Tai Black
    Dahomey
    Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Substance
    While its celebration of all things fleshly, protrusive, and gloriously ectoplasmic may not be for those viewers too faint of heart, Fargeat’s no-holds-barred, wholly beyond your wildest expectations approach with The Substance will leave genre fans kicking their feet up in glee.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Speak No Evil
    Where the horror of 2022′s Speak No Evil feels deeply, almost inescapably cruel in its final moments, Watkins’s film takes a relatively conventional approach, relying more on slasher tropes than producing a deep-seated sense of unease.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Thelma
    A tender comedy at heart, Thelma is a delightful romp that focuses on the different textures of the human experience and the poignant (and sometimes very silly) moments that come with it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Sarah-Tai Black
    Backspot
    An energetic coming-of-age film that pairs the tonalities of a rugged sports flick with the depth of a well-scripted drama, Backspot is a promising debut from Waterson that will leave audiences cheering.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    Occupied City
    As much as Occupied City’s observational eye is rooted in a humanistic and cumulative approach to history, it will, no doubt, leave those in search of a less austere approach wanting.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    The First Omen
    While unable to fully deliver on the promise of its artistic potential, The First Omen remains, nonetheless, a fun, low stakes introduction for horror newbies to The Omen franchise and an enjoyable enough tribute to the original film (offering, also, a more contemporary take on visualizing the grotesque).
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Blackening
    Even if its cultural and artistic stakes remain relatively low in the grand scheme of things, The Blackening – whose enjoyment absolutely lies in the fact that it both knows exactly the confines it’s working within and doesn’t take itself too seriously – is still a hell of a good time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    L'Immensità
    A love letter to its characters and their real-life counterparts, the film is, above all, a witness to the kind of expansive love and kinship that is formed in the margins but nonetheless expansive in its imaginings of the world.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Sarah-Tai Black
    A Thousand and One
    It is tempting to call A Thousand and One a love letter of sorts, but a more accurate read might be one of heartbreak. There is love here, certainly, but more than that there is frustration, anger and sadness at the way the world refuses to help those trying hardest to endure within it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    M3GAN
    It is a highly entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is unapologetic in both its self-awareness and sense of humour.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Inspection
    The labour the filmmaker undertakes here is similarly personal and intimate; it is clearly an act of healing as well as an offering for others who see their lives echoed.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
    Rare archival footage is intertwined among the film’s historical narrative with an all-too-rare grace — the images we see here lend themselves to a deep and nuanced understanding of Lowndes County at the time; not just the shared, communal efforts but the mapping of both community and anti-Blackness as it materialized through the everyday.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    A glossy and breezy summation of Black cinema history this is not, and thank goodness for that.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Sarah-Tai Black
    Ticket to Paradise
    Even if the effect of watching two mega-screen icons banter back and forth for an hour and change doesn’t add up to much, Clooney and Roberts still have a sort of sparkle between them. It is the exact sort of wholly inoffensive, if bland, charisma that’s perfect for low-key, weekend watching (made even better in your pyjamas and on your couch).
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Catherine Called Birdy
    There is a sincerity here that is unafraid of itself and – in what is most certainly a love letter to the beguiling and tumultuous affair that is girlhood – Catherine Called Birdy feels unique and special in a way that speaks directly to Birdy and other uncontainable girls like her.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Barbarian
    What Cregger best accomplishes with Barbarian is an unhinged sort of storytelling that nevertheless feels calculated in its design. It knows that comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin, and synthesizes both while also playfully knocking loose a screw or two.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Black Phone
    The Black Phone is an enjoyable watch, for sure, but it lacks a certain agility, which keeps it from being as great as we want it to be.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    Beast
    It’s an edge-of-your-seat crowd-pleaser that cares enough to develop its story world and characters just as well as its jump-scares and tension.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Sarah-Tai Black
    Nope
    While the tone and feel of Nope is wonderfully atmospheric and expansive, it also feels as if it comes at the expense of characters possessing deep interior lives or a story world that is well and evenly plotted.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Official Competition
    Official Competition is a coy satire that makes welcome use of biting meta-commentary and self-reflexive critique.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Marvelous and the Black Hole
    While par for the course in terms of its premise as well as much of its plotting, “Marvelous and the Black Hole” is still somewhat refreshing in its visual style and experimentation.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Paris, 13th District
    Paris, 13th District is not a revelation of a film, but it is a charismatic collection of moments worth spending time with.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Everything Everywhere All at Once
    It is a film that asks audiences to take the plunge into chaos and confusion, so that we’re able to fully see the innate humanity of what remains when the dust of it all settles.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    See You Then
    The film’s greatest achievement is the ease with which it traverses the delicate territory of its characters’ lives without losing the sense of a past both shared and fractured in memory.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    X
    West’s direction is exacting and rigorous. From the filmmaker’s more formal experimentations right down to the soundtrack, which is perfect, X feels like the exact movie its maker set out to create. Also on the money is Mia Goth’s performance as Maxine, a starry-eyed ingenue who is equal parts ordinary and glittering in her ambition and sexuality.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Fresh
    It doesn’t just offer up the most palatable aspects of horror as a genre; instead, it pushes it to its limits through a complete, and undoubtedly satisfying, reworking.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    Dog
    The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Harder They Fall
    Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Mad Women's Ball
    Laurent is determined in mapping the depiction of the patriarchal violence endured under both the supposition of scientific method as well as the social order of the world outside of the institution; however, the film struggles to keep a similar pace and substance within its story world.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Gravedigger's Wife
    Not precious, but humanist, The Gravedigger’s Wife is a striking first from a filmmaker and cast we should hope to see more of.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Guilty
    Fuqua is reliable in his continued ability to craft tense and measured films for broad audiences looking for complicated tales of morality.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 85 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Card Counter
    There is an urgency to these stylistic choices which ask us how we might best realize, through image and sound, both the memory and feeling of violence, of hope, of salvation for the damned. As in life, the grotesque and the beautiful exist concurrently and are each given fair weight.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    Flee
    Amin’s story is given life and depth, charted here with a care for his wholeness rather than too simply his refugee status.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    Neptune Frost
    While Neptune Frost is at no loss for multi-faceted thinking, its development of these concepts too often remains at the surface of meaning. The Black futures envisioned here are largely concerned with aesthetics and, while sonically and visually lush, seem hollow in comparison to the range of their full potential.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Zola
    Bravo’s style echoes King’s own: It is fun and whimsical, formally playful, sometimes bordering on the fantastic but always grounded in the real and the intimate.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    As a filmmaker, Questlove utilizes his celebrity connections more than he does original directorial vision, trading instead in long-established, standard documentary structure and form. Summer of Soul is polished, but it pales in stark comparison to the raw footage and energy of the Harlem Cultural Festival.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Sarah-Tai Black
    In Our Mothers' Gardens
    It’s a film to be watched not for its more literal filmmaking achievements, but rather for its ability to make you feel seen, with vulnerability and with love.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Nina Wu
    Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Sarah-Tai Black
    Rose Plays Julie
    A deeply aware film, Rose Plays Julie allows for the fantastic as a means and space of catharsis.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Sarah-Tai Black
    Test Pattern
    A deceptively simple and concise narrative structure allows Ford to parse her subject and characters with a graceful internal complexity that shows rather than tells.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Sarah-Tai Black
    One Night in Miami
    One Night In Miami is an accomplishment relative to the standards of its industry, but for filmgoers seeking new and exciting work that exists outside of that orbit, King’s film is one that you’ve seen before.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Sarah-Tai Black
    Another Round
    Vinterberg is a master of storytelling and character here, bringing forth equal parts tragicomedy and suspense in a way that is refreshingly eager to be grounded in the ordinary realities of life.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Sarah-Tai Black
    Small Axe: Mangrove
    With its visual, sonic and cultural gestures, the film is nothing less than a love letter to West Indian life, and makes home in its political figures and artists, its iconography, its food, its music, its gestures and movements all shared here on screen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Hate U Give
    Shaping the rhetoric of black activism and black liberation into accessible and demographic-spanning prose is no easy task. It is work which must be undertaken with intelligence, care and, above all, experience. It is no surprise then that the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s debut young-adult novel, The Hate U Give, into a big-budget studio picture loses much of its import in translation.

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