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Ella Taylor
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Critics' Group:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Twister (1996) |
In the wrong hands apocalypse can be deadly -- deadly dull, that is -- but when it comes to cheap thrills, Jan De Bont is up there with the best. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jul 16, 2024
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Steel Magnolias (1989) |
It's worth the price of a ticket to see the poised Olympia Dukakis as the elegant, amused widow of the mayor. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 01, 2024
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Grease (1978) |
Hang in there for the dance numbers and amuse yourself ID-ing the old-timers in the supporting cast. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 06, 2024
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Reservoir Dogs (1992) |
A fond genre move that's forever chortling up its sleeve at the puerile idiocy of the genre, a heist caper without a heist, an action movie that's hopelessly in love with talk and a poem to the sexiness of storytelling. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jan 12, 2024
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Traffic (2000) |
The pulsing heart of Traffic lies in the predicament of Del Toro’s Javier Rodriguez, an honest cop in a tangled web of graft. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Sep 07, 2023
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Lone Star (1996) |
Nobody in Lone Star talks in any thing resembling human speech -- they're too busy pushing the narrative around and lecturing one another on the evil arbitrariness of boundaries. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Moulin Rouge (2001) |
Baz Luhrmann has stuffed every idea or image that ever entered his head, or pop song that tickled his eclectic fancy, into this likable but fatally cluttered and overwhelmingly red extravaganza. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Sep 05, 2023
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Shakespeare in Love (1998) |
Though weakened by feeble leads, Shakespeare in Love is nicely pepped by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's malicious script and a slew of great supporting performances. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jan 05, 2023
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Braveheart (1995) |
Epic in length only and peppered with sniggering homophobia, the homage to Himself drags on for three hours going on three years. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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Mississippi Masala (1991) |
The script, though it clips along with a wicked capering wit, is forever explaining itself; the comedy is a broad grin filled with sitcom retreads... Delivered with enormous good humor and affection, all of this works. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Apr 15, 2022
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This Is My Life (1992) |
Unfortunately, it has no people in it; only a bunch of gag dispensers. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Apr 15, 2022
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Beloved (1998) |
Demme's Beloved is permanently heated to the boil. Rightly so, for the terrain of Toni Morrisons magisterial novel, on which the movie is based, is not the politics of slavery but its private agonies, the torture of evil turned inward against the self. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 02, 2022
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L.A. Confidential (1997) |
A masterfully smart and soulful film that bows low before genre even as it betrays it. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Oct 20, 2021
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Enemies, a Love Story (1989) |
For all his sincerity, Mazursky has ironed out Singer's wicked delight in the ambiguities and frailties of the human psyche, and turned the story into mere burlesque. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Aug 01, 2021
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A Shock to the System (1990) |
This is supposed to be a black comedy, but a lot of fancy footwork with camera close-ups aid musical drollery with a double bass do little to compensate for the thoroughly flat script. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Apr 09, 2021
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Face (2002) |
Feels like the stretched-out short student film that it is. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 13, 2021
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Cloud 9 (2008) |
Cloud 9 is most moving when it steps quietly into the gap between physical decline and the persistence, at full blast, of unfulfilled longing and desire. - NPR
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| Posted Sep 23, 2020
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Selah and the Spades (2019) |
A YA gangster movie that doubles as a soulful meditation on the beauty and danger of power, when all means justify the end of retaining that power. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 16, 2020
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Resistance (2020) |
Marceau truly was a hero who carried his sadness into his work, and Resistance is an honorable, absorbing homage to the making of a man and his art. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 26, 2020
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) |
Hittman is powerfully attuned to the unquestioning solidarity and indomitable moxie of teenaged girls, the wordless ways in which they fight and make up... - NPR
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| Posted Mar 12, 2020
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The Booksellers (2019) |
[A] delightful homage... - NPR
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| Posted Mar 06, 2020
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Greed (2019) |
Cunningly mounted to satirize the heavy-breathing structure of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Greed is a jaunty caper littered with farcical flashbacks... - NPR
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| Posted Feb 27, 2020
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Ordinary Love (2019) |
Unlike most others of its kind, this one trusts us to stick with the slew of treatments that often hurt more than the disease. In its cheekily Irish way it offers a portrait of a great and enduring love under acute pressure. - NPR
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| Posted Feb 13, 2020
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The Assistant (2019) |
Without resort to a single scene of graphic sexual violence, Green nails down the awful truth that Jane's exploitation is part and parcel of a silent but systemic abuse of powerless and vulnerable women. - NPR
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Weathering With You (2019) |
Shinkai may be dipping his toes in his own pre-tested global market. But Weathering With You rises gracefully above its copycat blueprint... - NPR
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| Posted Jan 16, 2020
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Invisible Life (2019) |
Traducing genuine suffering as mere histrionics (even the scaling of a fish becomes an excuse for violence), Aïnouz unnerves and alienates where he might illuminate. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 20, 2019
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Little Joe (2019) |
Effectively creepy... - NPR
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| Posted Dec 05, 2019
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63 Up (2019) |
What's striking is not just the sturdy durability of family and community, but the fundamental decency of just about every participant in this long cultural experiment. - NPR
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| Posted Nov 27, 2019
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) |
Even if you think Rogers' psychological model is simplistic, you can't help but climb aboard. - NPR
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| Posted Nov 22, 2019
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Frankie (2019) |
Sachs builds a physical world so relentlessly clean, classy, and gorgeous it teeters on the edge of travelogue. But he fails to people it with characters we could care much for or about, so busy are they shilling for banal observations on life. - NPR
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| Posted Oct 24, 2019
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Pain and Glory (2019) |
Performing at his mature finest, Banderas moves up and down the emotional register from mournful to puckish to regretful to freshly hopeful with a restraint that dials down Almodovar's breathy melodrama almost to straight realism. - NPR
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| Posted Oct 03, 2019
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Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019) |
Flamboyant, terrifying, and pointedly timely... - NPR
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| Posted Sep 19, 2019
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Before You Know It (2019) |
Wise, witty, and richly specific in its evocation of a family limping along on a wobbly foundation of secrets and lies. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 29, 2019
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Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) |
Just when you're ready to agree with Brügger's disclaiming admission that he's a lousy journalist and storyteller, the trail runs cold. Only then does the story roar back to sinister life, while the telling turns solemn. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 15, 2019
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David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) |
Passionate, wry, often bellicose, but always a candid and pithy storyteller... Crosby often seems to be writing his own self-lacerating obituary. - NPR
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| Posted Jul 18, 2019
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Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019) |
Marianne Ihlen doesn't steer this moving, sympathetic, but ultimately frustrating tribute. Perhaps inevitably, Cohen does, via Broomfield's fascination with the singer's tortured relations with the many women he romanced. - NPR
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| Posted Jul 05, 2019
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Wild Rose (2018) |
Buckley has bags of pugnacious charisma and a soaring, throaty singing voice tempered with enough vulnerability to make us want to hold her close even as the screw-up she offers us drives everyone in her orbit up the wall. - NPR
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| Posted Jun 20, 2019
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) |
The Last Black Man is a sequence of undeniably lovely grace notes that don't always cohere. Yet the movie is held together by the progress of Jimmie's conflict with himself... - NPR
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| Posted Jun 06, 2019
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Photograph (2019) |
The action - if that's what you call two people wandering around Mumbai - unfolds with the slow, intimate rhythms of classic Indian cinema, lightly juiced with the goofy high spirits and populist common touch of Bollywood. - NPR
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| Posted May 16, 2019
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Poms (2019) |
Even by the elastic standards of mass-market escapist trifles the creators of POMS might consider the challenges of growing old and confronting death without infantilizing both characters and audience. - NPR
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| Posted May 09, 2019
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Non-Fiction (2018) |
Non-Fiction is a mostly delightful, occasionally exhaustingly word-drunk comedy of manners larded with giddy farce. - NPR
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| Posted May 02, 2019
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Little Woods (2018) |
A modest but intensely empathetic first film by writer-director Nia DaCosta. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 18, 2019
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Hail Satan? (2019) |
A richly entertaining new documentary on the Satanic Temple's exploits from director Penny Lane, who has become one of our foremost chroniclers of bizarro Americana. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 18, 2019
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Teen Spirit (2018) |
It's Fanning... who retains the sweetness of this heavily-trodden teen fable without ever tipping it over into cloying goo. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 11, 2019
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Diane (2018) |
Jones fills her existential space with a bracing, though never unfeeling, inquiry into what it feels like to confront the steady drip of accumulating pain, and loss, and no longer being needed as we age. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 28, 2019
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Sunset (2018) |
Nemes can be relentlessly opaque, which at time makes the film a drag to follow. But there's method in his determination to leave us with nowhere to park our own affinities. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 21, 2019
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The Hummingbird Project (2018) |
At its best The Hummingbird Project is a parable about failure, but one that ultimately undercuts itself with redeeming goo. - NPR
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| Posted Mar 14, 2019
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Ghetto (2002) |
This is riveting stuff, especially in its account of how refugee culture and community spring up almost overnight. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jan 29, 2019
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All Is True (2018) |
In this lovely ode to a literary master, Branagh shows us what his hero always understood - that life may be an endlessly unfolding mystery, but in art, all is true. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 20, 2018
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Mary Queen of Scots (2018) |
Mary Queen of Scots does make a powerfully moving case for an uneasy dance between two powerful women hamstrung by male politics. - NPR
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| Posted Dec 06, 2018
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