Jessica Kiang

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IndieWire, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Playlist, Variety
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. Positive: 529 out of 750
  2. Mixed: 182 out of 750
  3. Negative: 39 out of 750
750 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    The Stranger
    Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching François Ozon’s The Stranger is not entirely dissimilar to that of reading Albert Camus’ 1942 classic.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Ava
    Mysius’ startlingly assured, exquisitely shot “Ava” is a film that doesn’t simply explore the textural possibilities of 35mm film for the hell of it, it makes thematic use of them, to stunning, evocative effect.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    No Other Choice
    The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Rimini
    This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Anne at 13,000 ft
    Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Eephus
    Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make Eephus a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Falcon Lake
    Coming-of-age movies are usually, like growing up itself, some combination of funny, sad, rueful, awkward or frightening, but rarely are they so successfully all those things at once as in Falcon Lake.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    She Will
    As a superbly crafted, thematically rich fable, it administers a potent dose of #MeToo vengeance, all while wearing its nasty sense of humor like a red-lipstick grin applied to a perfectly masklike face.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    This Much I Know to Be True
    This remarkable performance documentary may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    We
    Diop’s small but potent act of subversion, in choosing disparate lives and moments that could seem linked by a railway line and nothing more, is not just to enlarge the idea of who is meant by the collective French “We.” It is also to reclaim the selection process for inclusion within that tiny, divided pronoun.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Reality
    Reality can be stranger than fiction, but “Reality” fuses the two to become stranger, and more riveting, still.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Grand Tour
    But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Writing with Fire
    Thomas and Ghosh have found their angle, and it’s a powerful one.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Prayers for the Stolen
    The film may be called “Prayers for the Stolen,” but it is much more a heartbroken lament for the circuits that are broken when the stealing happens, and for the spaces the stolen leave behind.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Ghost Trail
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    The Hate U Give
    Without compromising the complexity of the issues raised, or condescending to the youth of its protagonists, The Hate U Give strides with absorbing, intelligent certainty through the desperately dangerous, uneven terrain of racially divided America.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Two Prosecutors
    In Two Prosecutors, perhaps out of deference to the source text, Loznitsa plays it straighter than in either of those titles and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    A Dark, Dark Man
    It’s a deliciously pessimistic testament, for those on its deliberate, low-frequency wavelength, to the power of an unapologetically auteurist, art-house approach to genre.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    We Are Little Zombies
    No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    The Innocents
    This superior chiller is both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality; its most striking aspect may just be the empathy Vogt displays for his 7- to 11-year-old stars, and the extraordinary juvenile performances that empathy brings out.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    The Royal Hotel
    It’s all so horribly familiar — even for those who have never traveled, never tended bar, and never found themselves the only female in a roomful of drunken, lonely men. The central terror of Green’s ferociously tense, intelligent movie is the terror of recognition.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Corsage
    Full of odd glitches and deliberate flubs in period detail, the film feels like an invitation into a secret conspiracy to reach back through time and, with deft, irreverent 21st-century fingers, loosen the stays on Empress Elisabeth’s corsetry just a little.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    So Long, My Son
    Utterly wrenching.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Father Mother Sister Brother
    Father Mother Sister Brother is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    How to Have Sex
    The extraordinarily perceptive How to Have Sex pulls off many feats of daring: Nicolas Canniccioni’s alcopop-hangover photography, James Jacobs’ chemical club-anthem score, Mia McKenna-Bruce’s star-making central turn. But the most impressive is first-time writer-director Molly Manning Walker getting us not just to forgive her central triad their brash and brainless bravado, but to grieve for it when it’s gone.
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