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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 58 Sarah-Tai Black
    Demonic
    Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form. While it is refreshing to see the groundedness with which the director approaches his newest project, his larger-than-life ideas still seem to have trouble finding their exact footing.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore
    One is given to wonder what it is exactly that the filmmaker himself lends to this film other than a completely ordinary commercial veneer.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Sarah-Tai Black
    Bad Trip
    The laughs are certainly there, but Andre’s almost trademark sense of intentional derangement is missing and in many ways, this is one of his strengths as a performer.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Sarah-Tai Black
    Antebellum
    Antebellum is a film that lives smugly within its final reveal – and what’s worse, this reveal is more groan-inducing than anything else.
    • 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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