Jessica Kiang

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For 750 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. Negative: 39 out of 750
750 movie reviews
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    A pair of rich central performances, an authentic eye for its second-generation immigrant milieu and a novelist’s comfort with ambiguity allow Natasha to modestly transcend its overpopulated genre.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    Jodorowsky throws everything and several kitchen sinks into the film, yet it all has its place, and the overall effect is not of the headachey mess it would be in anyone else’s hands, but of a kind of joyous, absurdist melange of highbrow concepts, personal memoir and potty humor.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    There’s the potential for melodrama, but despite the misleadingly grandiose title, The Truth is not in the business of the grand, tormented revelation. Instead, it’s an accretion of little moments, often very funny, sometimes a little sad, but always embedded in the reality of these sharply drawn, idiosyncratic characters.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    A Hard Day is a film that sets itself fairly narrow ambitions, achieves all of them and then some and yet has no pretensions to importance, weightiness or artistic self-expression.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    “Ballad” is assembled with such peculiar, calm exactness that it actually resembles a series of experiments in simplicity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story, especially when the picture they form is so harrowing. But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    It is problematic that many of the film’s most powerful segments are its most prurient, and even more, that they are juxtaposed with the poetic and the prosaic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    An enigmatic and perhaps occasionally overly deferential documentary about one of the all-time great character actors, Sophie Huber’s Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, is slow out of the gate, but gently, ever so gently, builds to a thoughtful portrait of a thoughtful man.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    Kore-eda's trademark humility and humanism is here, and we do get glimpses, even stretches, that suggest the piercingly bittersweet vitality of his best work. But "Our Little Sister" feels like "Kore-eda lite."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Without overly romanticizing it or suggesting that, ultimately, it is anything more than a business built around the talents of some very singular men, Sunada's film becomes a love letter of a most unusual kind, because it is addressed to a place that is unremarkable in every way except for the spirit that flowed through it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    A gorgeously playful oddity glimmering with insight into ideology, photography, cartography, telegraphy, celebrity, solidarity, the flow of capital, the unruliness of time and the somehow noble lunacy of trying to tame such a massive concept into a brass doodad small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Perhaps the key issue, aside from the inherent silliness of the unsubstantiated mystical psychobabble that is fielded as an explanation for Inés’ “condition” is that Inés herself is not a particularly well-developed character.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    [Ginghină's] endlessly evolving ideas for revolutionizing football are not a blueprint for a real-world solution at all. Instead they represent that intensely relatable and human place inside, where any of us, however small our lives and crushed our ambitions, can be limitless, unhobbled by injury, unfettered by ordinariness, unbounded by physics: infinite.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off The Plagiarists, and it is highly contagious.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    For all its flaws, or rather for all the magnitude of its one massive flaw, it is more sincere than arch, and more earnest, certainly in its desire to get its makers onto the radar, than glib.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    O’Connor’s well-modulated debut doesn’t pretend to be a faithful recreation of the facts of the Brontës’ lives. Instead it succeeds on a much trickier level, giving us a psychologically vivid Emily who did not write “Wuthering Heights” because a real-life romance unlocked her passionate nature, but whom we’d love to imagine having had such a grand affair, because she was always the woman with “Wuthering Heights” inside her.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    This is a gorgeously realized popcorn movie of the most satisfying, comforting, restorative kind: full as its heart is, it has a lot on its mind, yet you’d also quite like to curl up on its belly and doze in the sun.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    As befits the son of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (and director of acclaimed documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) Sora displays a subtly fervent faith in music as perhaps the ultimate expression of nascent individuality, and therefore, ever and eternally, a threat to regimes that rely on conformity and obedience.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    Its very wonkiness is one of the things that makes A Bigger Splash a good time — the sense of a filmmaker, perhaps aware that the story he's telling is not terribly deep or philosophically provocative, allowing himself to go off the rails every now and then in how he's telling it.

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