Ella Taylor, NPR
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For 120 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 77% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 18% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 14.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ella Taylor's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 74
Highest review score:
How to Survive a Plague
Critic Score 95
Lowest review score:
Letters to Juliet
Critic Score 25
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 102 out of 120
  2. Mixed: 13 out of 120
  3. Negative: 5 out of 120
120 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 85
    • Ella Taylor 95
    Vincere
    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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    • Metascore: 85
    • Ella Taylor 95
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    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.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Ella Taylor 95
    This Is Not a Film
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Ella Taylor 95
    The Master
    Without ever saying so, the movie adds up to nothing less than a social psychology of the nervous, spiritually questing geist of post-World War II America.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Ella Taylor 95
    How to Survive a Plague
    ACT UP soldiers on today, as it must, given the lack of official attention to the resurgence of HIV among young American men in metropolitan areas.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Greenberg
    Greenberg is on every level the work of a more mature filmmaker, and quite possibly a happier man.
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    • Metascore: 86
    • Ella Taylor 90
    The Kids Are All Right
    It's a classic Hollywood domestic comedy with a mischievous twist.
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    • Metascore: 75
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Bridesmaids
    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.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    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.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Khodorkovsky
    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.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Pariah
    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.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    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.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Searching for Sugar Man
    Intentionally or not, Searching for Sugar Man catches all that - the fleeting moments of triumph and the years of endurance, the accumulation of family and the unquenched dreams - and doesn't presume to sew it all up for us.
    • Metascore: 94
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Amour
    At his provocative best, though - in his brilliant, gorgeous 2009 film "The White Ribbon," a study of the roots of fascism in domestic tyranny, and now in Amour - Haneke implicates us in the full range of human capacity.
    • Metascore: 66
    • Ella Taylor 90
    Yossi
    Funny, exuberant and shamelessly seductive, Yossi is an unabashedly populist entertainment with a spirit conciliatory enough to melt the heart of any naysayer.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Ella Taylor 85
    The Maid
    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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    • Metascore: 78
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Please Give
    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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    • Metascore: 76
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    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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    • Metascore: 90
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Winter's Bone
    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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    • Metascore: 76
    • Ella Taylor 85
    A Mother's Courage: Talking Back to Autism
    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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    • Metascore: 69
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Kings of Pastry
    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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    • Metascore: 64
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Tamara Drewe
    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.
    • Metascore: 39
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Inhale
    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.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Ella Taylor 85
    White Material
    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.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Rabbit Hole
    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.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Meek's Cutoff
    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.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Project Nim
    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.
    • Metascore: 62
    • Ella Taylor 85
    The First Beautiful Thing
    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.
    • Metascore: 41
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
    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.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Ella Taylor 85
    Hipsters
    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.
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