Jessica Kiang

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For 746 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 39% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jessica Kiang's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Birds of Passage
Lowest review score: 0 After We Collided
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 526 out of 746
  2. Mixed: 181 out of 746
  3. Negative: 39 out of 746
746 movie reviews
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    • tbd Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    The Flood Won't Come
    Thanks to some truly original, very striking imagery and the vague sense that Sargsyan knows what he’s getting at, even if you don’t, if you’re willing to commit resources to the tense ground war between frustration and revelation, the latter just about wins out.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Lamb
    No matter how pure your intentions nor how real your pain, these ancient myths all teach us, debts always come due, and the chilling denouement of Jóhannsson’s dark, deliberate debut suggests that is what Lamb is: a modern-day take on some ancient, pre-Disneyfication fairy tale or a nursery rhyme with a sinister history encoded into its Spartan melody.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    In Front of Your Face
    Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    Vortex
    Doubtless, due to Noé’s own real-world experiences, “Vortex” is a success, if a dolorous one: a dignified, sometimes desperate tribute to, as the dedication reads, “all those whose minds will decompose before their hearts.”
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    The Story of My Wife
    Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Petrov's Flu
    Petrov’s Flu is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Nitram
    In its quiet respect for the victims’ dignity, its uniformly outstanding performances and in apportioning responsibility only to those who shirked their responsibilities, and deploying a grief-struck compassion toward everyone else, Nitram may come to be recognized as one of the finest exemplars yet of the mass-shooting movie — inasmuch as we can stomach having an entire genre built around the phenomenon.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Casablanca Beats
    It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Titane
    Titane is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Compartment No. 6
    The humdrum and heartswelling Compartment No. 6 evokes a powerful nostalgia for a type of loneliness we don’t really have any more, and for the type of love that was its cure.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    The French Dispatch
    A work of such unparalleled Andersonian wit, that at times the sheer level of detail – mobile, static, graphic and typographic – that bedecked the screen was enough to make your correspondent’s jaw slacken. Which meant curtains for the carpet as I was smoking a cigarillo.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Bergman Island
    This is an auto-auto-auto-fiction that throws out the occasional fun, cinephiliac in-joke, and teases the odd insight into creative blockage and romantic unfulfillment. But mostly, it serves to prove the old adage that a self-deprecating awareness that your movie has nothing going on in it is no substitute for having something going on in your movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Ahed's Knee
    Quite possibly brilliant, and very definitely all but unbearable, Ahed’s Knee is filmmaking as hostage-taking. If such language seems charged, this is Nadav Lapid: All language is charged.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    Benedetta
    If Benedetta is a joke that Verhoeven is in on, and that is designed to play to those in on it too, we can at least be thankful that it’s a good joke – not that there’s anyone up there to be thankful to.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    The Witches of the Orient
    For all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Les Nôtres
    Les Nôtres” remains — right up to its tight, repressed ending — a deeply disquieting, superbly performed evocation of a very banal sort of evil.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Sweet Thing
    A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Sabaya
    Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Monuments
    There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Kiang
    American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
    Clumsy, campy and kitsch, but also deadeningly dull for long stretches.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Kiang
    New Order
    It is not only bludgeoningly nasty but also, viewed from a May 2021 standpoint, quite staggeringly un-prescient.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Playing with Sharks
    If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Sound of Violence
    The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Riders of Justice
    Such wild zigzags in tone — between bumbling physical comedy and lightly stinging satirical observation, between heartbreaking vulnerability and bursts of gleefully vicious, slickly choreographed violence — ought not to work at all. And yet they do, thanks to Jensen’s calm, slightly wry command of the story, and a cast that have all understood the assignment, even when their respective assignments are all quite different.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Those Who Wish Me Dead
    An enjoyable, absorbing, characterful testament to shuffling the whole deck of genre conventions, and then politely setting it on fire.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Profile
    Like any weird internet rabbit hole you might fall down when you know you should be reading a book or brewing kombucha or going to sleep, this thriller is almost annoyingly slick and moreish.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    The Perfect Candidate
    The Perfect Candidate doesn’t burn the veil, but it does lift it briefly, allowing us a glimpse of Saudi womanhood that is idiosyncratic and individual — in short, as we very rarely see it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    The Water Man
    Its sincerity and solidity are never in doubt — the actor’s directorial career is certainly off to a clean-lined, competent start. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the sort of film that fond parents wish their children would love, as opposed to a film their children actually will love.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    The Paper Tigers
    The three leads summon lovely chemistry, re-creating a dorky-kid dynamic in later life that feels like the perfect summation of the film’s almost Spielbergian belief that at 10 years of age we are our best and truest selves.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Stowaway
    For the most part, aside from a slightly slack start, and its stirring but simplistic ending, that kind of well-researched procedural detail is what makes Penna’s film such an engrossing and surprisingly touching addition to a genre already bursting with splashier, more extravagant and more overtly sentimental titles.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Together Together
    If it’s an ASMR video for pandemic-raddled emotions you’re after, you could do so much worse.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Berlin Alexanderplatz
    Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Reefa
    Reefa, based on an enraging, heartbreaking real-life event, paints over the colors, creativity and chaos of its true-life tragedy with layer of film-convention formula
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Gunda
    Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Kiang
    Thunder Force
    Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Jakob's Wife
    Despite Crampton and Fessenden’s game playing, and a few nicely icky practical effects, “Jakob’s Wife” feels strangely anemic, which, as we all know is more fatal to the already iron-deficient movie vampire than garlic, holy water and sunshine combined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Nina Wu
    Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    Rose Plays Julie
    The most disturbing thing about the impressively disturbing Rose Plays Julie may just be how satisfying it is.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    [A] lengthy but absorbing and illuminating documentary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    We are active participants in the creation of this (or any) work of cinema. And given how much this movie loves the movies, as well as dogs, music, children, soccer, ice cream, the ancient Georgian town of Kutaisi, and the very process of falling in love, there is something immensely hopeful and moving about being thus invited to collude.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Boogie
    As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Introduction
    This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Test Pattern
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    I Blame Society
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    The purposely messy, garish and disposable comedy from Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as the fortysomething Midwesterners of the title, is so determinedly low-stakes that to quibble with its candy-colored craving to be liked is to be a terrible killjoy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    The Sparks Brothers
    After the 140 minutes of “The Sparks Brothers” zip by like a tight half-hour, even the previously uninitiated may well feel like they’ve known Sparks all along – or at least that they should have.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet
    It presents details so small they belong under a microscope, and events so large they belong in science fiction; that these chopped fragments can build to an experience so smooth and significant is only because of Katz’s radical re-centering of the drama, away from what happens and onto the life it happens to.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    Prisoners of the Ghostland
    It’s not very good except sometimes when it’s fantastic.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    Passing
    This radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    Mass
    For a good hour of the film’s running time, Kranz’s restraint is admirable, his script allowing his four superb actors to find and flesh out their characters, so it feels like we’re watching people, not merely a situation. Each of the four manages the changing colors of their monologues.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    Land
    Despite some pretty vistas and a typically watchable performance from Wright, Land proffers rather too tidy a reiteration of things the movies taught us long ago, about how embracing life means embracing pain and how it’s only through connecting to others that we can truly know ourselves.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Jessica Kiang
    How It Ends
    “How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Cryptozoo
    In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Censor
    Censor is a stylish calling card for all involved, one that certainly demonstrates an impressive level of directorial control for a debut filmmaker. But that control does sometimes feel like constriction.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    Quo Vadis, Aida?
    This is not historical revisionism, if anything, Quo Vadis, Aida? works to un-revise history, re-centering the victims’ plight as the eye of a storm of evils — not only the massacre itself, but the broader evils of institutional failure and international indifference.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Ham on Rye
    Ham on Rye is not obviously political, but it is also deeply political, pointing out, in lazy, absurdist, carelessly clever frames a​ deep-set​ American wrongness that was quietly murmuring away long before the current blowhard moment, and that will continue long after.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Dead Pigs
    If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Acasă, My Home
    Balance and objectivity are laudable instincts, but they can put the film at a slightly frustrating remove.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 Jessica Kiang
    Wild Mountain Thyme
    Speaking from personal experience as a fictional creature made of three-parts shamrock, two-parts rainbow, and one-part outdoor plumbing, I can tell you “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a very accurate portrait of modern Irish colleen/gombeen relationships. ‘Tis true, we none of us own a computer or a mobile phone (the air’s so thick with faeries and Catholicism that you can’t get decent Wifi anyway).
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Chick Fight
    Instead of the cleavage, hair-pulling and Jerry Springer antics it teases, Chick Fight serves up a blandly formulaic and scrupulously inoffensive tale of female empowerment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Monsoon
    Monsoon is a graceful and truthfully irresolute investigation into the strange, often poignantly unreciprocated relationship that many first- and second-generation emigrants have with the far-off foreign country of the past.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Farewell Amor
    The simple humanism here makes the case for nurturing and celebrating America’s immigrant population in a more eloquent and persuasive way than a more polemical film ever could.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 0 Jessica Kiang
    After We Collided
    “After” was merely awful. After We Collided is atrocious. Naturally, it’s proving an enormous pandemic-era hit.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Radium Girls
    Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Love and Monsters
    In Love and Monsters, love is good, monsters are bad and feeling like Tom Cruise is “awesome.”
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    The Last Shift
    One is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve The Last Shift made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    The Human Voice
    This is Almodóvar, and so the magnificence is worn lightly, with irony and mischief and a cheeky little moral about how to be a modern woman trapped in the very unmodern role of spurned lover: be hysterical if you want, be philosophical if you can, but never underestimate the liberating power of a little light revenge.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Rifkin's Festival
    It’s a relief to report that Rifkin’s Festival is, to the ravenous captive, like finding an unexpected stash of dessert: not substantial and not nutritious, but sweet enough to remind you in passing of the good times you once had, despite all that’s happened in the interim.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Mainstream
    A brittle, exasperated satire on social media celebrity, her sophomore film, like the tacky messiah it creates in Andrew Garfield’s YouTube sensation, soon becomes the very thing it sets out to expose: a glittery, jangly image machine that manufactures little of actual substance, except the conclusion that social media = bad.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 25 Jessica Kiang
    Run Hide Fight
    At literally no point in this weirdly lumbering, sluggish movie’s narrative does its grotesque tastelessness ever appear to have occurred to anyone involved.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    The Best Is Yet to Come
    The Best Is Yet to Come is superbly well-made, making a compelling case for recognizing the humanity of others even in the midst of illness, even when ignorance and politicized paranoia threaten your compassion. It’s not hard to discern the relevance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    Mandibles
    The really new news of Mandibles however, is, where in the past Dupieux’s surrealism always had a cynical, sinister, even murderous undercurrent, here, he lets himself be cheerful, as though infected by the sweet-natured bromance between his appealing, appalling idiot leads.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    Hopper/Welles
    We expect nothing less than conversational pyrotechnics from two such outsize personalities, and there are many confrontational moments. But what emerges more strongly is a sense of mutual admiration – sometimes even envy – and a fascinating snapshot of a period in time when movies could really matter, as experienced by two men whose movies were among those that mattered most.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    In Between Dying
    The existential road movie gets an offbeat, elliptical yet peculiarly compelling Transcaucasian makeover in director Hilal Baydarov’s second fiction feature, In Between Dying.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    The Duke
    You could dine on nothing but lard for twenty years and still not develop the hardness of heart necessary to avoid being won over by Roger Michell‘s The Duke, a ridiculously charming British comedy that dunks a gamely accented prestige cast into an appealingly milky true story like so many digestives into a warm, well-earned, early evening cuppa.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    The World to Come
    Although arranged around a fulfilling, life-changing connection The World to Come is a deeply lonesome lovesong.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Dear Comrades!
    Meticulous and majestic, epic in scope and tattoo-needle intimate in effect, this scrupulous recreation of the lead-up to and aftermath of the Novocherkassk massacre six decades ago is excoriating proof that not all filmmakers are made sloppy or slipshod by anger. Some are made ever more righteously, icily precise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    Pieces of a Woman
    Wéber’s writing and Kirby’s performance, working in concert with Mundruczó’s dazzling, multifaceted direction, Howard Shore‘s gorgeously mood-appropriate score and, again, Loeb’s drifting, searching, soulful camera together create, from so many disparate pieces, an entirely complete portrait, that even suggests further internal universes still to be explored, universes every one of us contains.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    One Night in Miami
    As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, One Night in Miami is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.
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