Ella Taylor, NPR
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For 79 reviews, this critic has graded:
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77% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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20% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 14.5 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Ella Taylor's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 74 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
95
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
25
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 68 out of 79
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Mixed: 7 out of 79
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Negative: 4 out of 79
79
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Ella Taylor 95
Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani. -
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Ella Taylor 95
The screenplay, by Peter Straughan and his late wife, Bridget O'Connor, is debonair. Alfredson's mastery of tone and ambiance is flawless. The bloodletting is brief and necessarily appalling, the comedy mordant: I guarantee you will never sing along to "Mr. Woo" in quite the same way again.- Posted Dec 9, 2011
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Ella Taylor 95
If you pay close attention, there's also an exhilarating evocation of how art is stubbornly made, and arbitrary authority put in its place, under the most confining conditions. Rene Magritte, whose famous pipe painting is slyly honored in the movie's title, would be jazzed.- Posted Mar 2, 2012
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Ella Taylor 90
Greenberg is on every level the work of a more mature filmmaker, and quite possibly a happier man. -
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Ella Taylor 90
It's a classic Hollywood domestic comedy with a mischievous twist. -
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Ella Taylor 90
And at its loony best, Wiig and Mumolo's script hurls a torrent of bridesmaid-zilla set pieces at us, playing out like a "Sex and the City 3" read-through gone deliciously awry.- Posted May 13, 2011
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Ella Taylor 90
You don't have to believe in the transmigration of souls to fall languorously in love with the Thai film that won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival.- Posted Mar 3, 2011
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Ella Taylor 90
Tuschi has made a docu-thriller of enormous narrative flair and visual smarts. It's a perfect fit for the blend of Greek tragedy, spaghetti Western and judicial farce that defines business and politics in the New Russia.- Posted Dec 2, 2011
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Ella Taylor 90
The movie is anything but combative. Pariah is a tender, sporadically goofy, yet candid examination of emergent identity, a film whose lack of attitude sets it apart from much of the hard-bitten, thug-life storytelling that's dominated African-American cinema for decades.- Posted Dec 30, 2011
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Ella Taylor 90
Judged by the ideological terms on which it was founded, you could say the kibbutz experiment has failed. I, for one, could never have made a permanent home there. Yet the sense of community was real, and those cavernous dining halls supply some of the happiest memories of my youth.- Posted Apr 27, 2012
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Ella Taylor 85
In the end what drives the movie is the hip young filmmaker's struggle with himself -- his showman's need to toy with our anxieties threatening to overwhelm his desire to make amends to all the servants he took for granted growing up. -
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Ella Taylor 85
Like all her (Holofcener) movies, Please Give is multitonal, as tenderly sympathetic as it is tough toward all its tortured, even unlikable characters. -
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Ella Taylor 85
More than anything, though, Living in Emergency leaves us wanting to know more about what makes these four people tick differently from the rest of us -- we who balk at anything riskier than signing petitions and joining Facebook protest groups. -
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Ella Taylor 85
On its face, Winter's Bone, like "Down to the Bone," is a bleakly realist drama about a community decimated by poverty and hopelessness, yet bound together by deep ties of class, gender and blood. -
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Ella Taylor 85
The star of the film is a matter-of-fact, highly perceptive Indian woman, Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose autistic adult son is now a published author. -
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Ella Taylor 85
Kings of Pastry is about the craft, the teaching and learning, the collaborative work, the tedium, the heartbreak and emotional backbone it takes to make something lovely, even if that something is destined to disappear down a gullet in seconds - and even if the maker ends up a noble failure. -
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Ella Taylor 85
On its own terms, Tamara Drewe is a hugely exuberant black comedy, unfolding over four scenic seasons at a writer's retreat set in a rose-strewn village overrun by city bobos in search of authenticity.- Posted Oct 20, 2010
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Ella Taylor 85
What is singular about Inhale is the intelligent way in which plot and character keep opening up the moral landscape so as to complicate our responses to Paul's multiplying dilemmas.- Posted Oct 22, 2010
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Ella Taylor 85
Yet in the end it's less the climactic madness and mayhem in White Material that sear the memory than it is the silent, balletic creep of child soldiers, grabbed out of school and sent with machetes and rifles through a forest to exact revenge for decades of repression.- Posted Dec 12, 2010
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Ella Taylor 85
Mitchell brings respect, tenderness and a generous helping of his antic wit to Rabbit Hole, not to mention a rare gift for adding visual radiance to a talky stage play.- Posted Dec 17, 2010
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Ella Taylor 85
If Meek's Cutoff is every inch a Western, it's an art-film mutant of the genre, inching along with intensely naturalistic obsession for detail that courts tedium even as it dares us not to pay attention.- Posted Apr 7, 2011
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Ella Taylor 85
Nim's suffering is heartbreaking, but Marsh's melodramatic style, with its re-enactments and intense score, sometimes feels bombastic and overblown for a group of people who, aside from the frighteningly detached and morally careless Terrace, seem to be garden-variety neurotics and narcissists, more clueless than willfully cruel.- Posted Jul 8, 2011
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Ella Taylor 85
It's fair to say that men in general and ardent Catholics in particular don't come off well. Yet even they are humanized by the movie's merciful temper, and by a cast of damaged ancillary characters wearing eccentric goodwill on their sleeves.- Posted Apr 15, 2011
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Ella Taylor 85
Never one to take a back seat in his movies, Broomfield projects a shambling, Columbo-style bonhomie that gains him access to people who should be very afraid of letting him cross their threshold.- Posted Sep 30, 2011
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Ella Taylor 85
The hipster moment may have faded fast through repression and attrition, but in Todorovsky's reading, it was crucially formative on today's Russian youth.- Posted Feb 24, 2012
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Ella Taylor 85
The elephant in the room of any discussion of Poland and the Jews is that country's less-than-glorious record of betrayal and collaboration with the Nazis. Holland, who is half-Jewish and whose mother was active in the Polish Resistance, doesn't shrink from that legacy.- Posted Feb 15, 2012
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Ella Taylor 85
God Bless America ends with a couple of tale-twisting bullet orgies designed to take your preconceptions, as well as your nerve-endings, by surprise.- Posted May 11, 2012
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Ella Taylor 85
Beneath the noirish topicality of Elena, which won a special jury prize at Cannes last year, lies a bone-deep existential unease and spiritual alienation, a preoccupation with sin that is at once quintessentially Russian and wholly archaic.- Posted May 22, 2012
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Ella Taylor 80
Handsomely and vividly mounted, in a palette of period chocolates and golds, Get Low opens with an image of a burning man running from a house on fire -- an enticing promise of Southern Gothic that the movie never quite fulfills. -
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Ella Taylor 80
Ondine plumbs the country's most resonant fairy tale and plays impishly along the borders of postcard fantasies of Ireland. -
