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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    My Name Is Pauli Murray
    The research is there, certainly, but it is presented as if it were just that, without thought for the ways it could be presented in a more expressive form. There is a sense here that film is at most a communicative tool to simply transmit this information, rather than a way to enliven and reactivate new ways of thinking about this galvanizing figure’s past and the resonance of their work in our present. This is a shame. Murray deserves nothing less than a history in full color.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Topside
    While Topside is without a doubt a film that lives within its own immediacy, it also feels somewhat entrenched within the hopeless inevitability of its own story.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Catch the Fair One
    That “Catch the Fair One” can’t imagine more for its characters, for the world it shapes, is its most glaring fault, and one that will likely leave many taking a deep breath as the credits roll.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Don't Make Me Go
    While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Emergency
    The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    Spiral too often gets in its own way and reveals its internal machinations before they’re due.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
    While Robinson’s lecture is thought-provoking and his living tour of that same history is illuminating, the Kunstlers don’t add much in terms of directorial vision. Robinson is an apt orator and tour guide, but the literal translation of his lecture to screen lacks life and suffers from the inherent banality that comes with watching a recording of someone – no matter how charismatic – speaking to a live audience we are not part of.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Sarah-Tai Black
    A Journal for Jordan
    There is a specific tone to films scheduled for a holiday release – in short, they’re corny. And while that’s not always a bad thing, this year’s yuletide flick, A Journal for Jordan, feels particularly dated and often times emotionally cloying.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Sarah-Tai Black
    Alice
    Ver Linden has the potential to twist and upend expectations – to play with genre and character in a way that reworks and remixes both film history and storytelling. Instead, she spends the majority of her film’s runtime vaguely approaching those intentions rather than actually materializing them. It is a tiring series of runarounds that viewers will lose patience for.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Sarah-Tai Black
    Candyman
    In its attempts to revisit the original film’s discrepancies, DaCosta’s film ends up only retracing its narrative inconsistencies with full force and even deeper perplexity. Gone is the alluring entanglement of erotics and fright, replaced here by flat characters limply stumbling over a script intent on hitting us over the head with its social commentary.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Sarah-Tai Black
    On the Come Up
    With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.
    • 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.
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