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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    While the original Now You See Me had a winking audacity that leaned into the absurdity of its bag of tricks, the newest installment feels rote and lacks the thrill of genuine surprise.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Him
    While HIM’s visual and cinematographic landscapes might be stylistically evocative at times, they lack in narrative substance and a discerning formal logic, reducing images and themes rife with narrative potential into a series of hollowly aestheticized surfaces that squander the film’s own potential as well as the talent of its actors.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Honey Don't!
    Honey Don’t! attempts another go at a mock, low-brow outing reimagined through a queer lens, but suffers irrevocably from an uncompelling mystery, patterned by a series of gags that leads nowhere.
    • 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.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Opus
    Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 25 Sarah-Tai Black
    Emilia Pérez
    It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Venom: The Last Dance
    Venom: The Last Dance remains steadfast in the franchise’s commitment to storytelling that, like a pot of water that never quite hits boiling point, is neither so-bad-it’s-good nor so bad it’s raucously entertaining, even if only unintentionally so.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 38 Sarah-Tai Black
    Strange Darling
    Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    MaXXXine
    As compared to both X and Pearl, West’s bag of cinema tricks in MaXXXine reaches a level of engagement that feels both compulsive and abridged.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Strangers: Chapter 1
    While it’s not as much of a slow-burn of psychological torture as Bertino’s original, Chapter 1 sticks to the course and doesn’t let up on its lead characters once.
    • 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).
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Immaculate
    While its penultimate scene returns to its affections for shock and gore, there remains a feeling that it’s been apologetically tacked on to a final act that is, overall, lacking in any other sort of fun or thrilling narrative twists and turns.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Origin
    While Ellis-Taylor is, as always, magnetic onscreen, Origin fails her talents, as well as both its characters and story, by reproducing the flaws of Wilkerson’s book with a stoic conviction.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Strays
    With what is clearly Perrault’s first feature script, the stars here struggle to keep up their energy in what adds up to be 93 minutes of crude jokes.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Sarah-Tai Black
    Outlaw Johnny Black
    While its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
    While ideas concerning the awakening of the dead are rife with transformational potential, in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster the means used to materialize them leave much to be desired.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons
    While it is engaging to witness and hear of the ways that Hammons has continued to reject and undermine this market-minded approach to his work in the present day, the film’s focus on tracing Hammons’ work through capital, be it social or monetary, leaves the film with a bottom-heavy feeling of what can only be described as “ick.”
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Sarah-Tai Black
    Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Soderbergh’s film tosses the many lessons of its predecessors, leaving us with a movie that is utterly devoid of its own magic.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Sarah-Tai Black
    Women Talking
    It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.
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