Jessica Kiang

Select another critic »
IndieWire, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Playlist, Variety
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
view
per page
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Black '47
    Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    The Command
    Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Shadow
    Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    The Nightingale
    With all this evocative material available it’s unfortunate that Kent lavishes so much of the overgenerous runtime on repetitive and redundant plotting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    The Mountain
    So much does not connect here and so much is designed to discomfit that there is unexpected resonance when Alverson lays aside the scabrousness and puts down oddball drollery to remind us that inside every lonely young man, there’s a shivering kid waiting to be picked up and brought in from the snow.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Kiang
    Life Itself
    It is sentimental and sprawling, which are not necessarily bad things, but also manipulative and contrived, which very much are.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    High Life
    This kinky, often grotesque melding of genre science-fiction with all-out body horror is an audacious project, but the scope of its ambition is cleverly reined in by the low-key presentation, its more salacious potential muted down to an insistent threatening hum, like the background radiation of Stuart Staples’ score.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Charlie Says
    The film Harron delivers is so ambivalent as to be frustratingly gun-shy about truly asserting a point of view, or adding anything meaningful to the already thriving cottage industry of Manson-adjacent storytelling.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Kiang
    The Little Mermaid
    Creaky visual effects, slapdash plotting and a script drunk on cliché: There’s pretty much nothing but cheap parlor trickery here.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Nelly
    Émond obviously has deep feeling for Arcan, and “Nelly” is a sincere and respectful attempt to do at least partial, fragmentary justice to a troubled woman able to self-create any persona except a happy one, but it can’t put her back together again.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    22 July
    Crudely put: it is distancing to hear people cry for help or speak anguished, halting truths from their hearts in a second language, and for all the bruising effectiveness of the filmmaking at times, it’s a distraction which 22 July never quite overcomes.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    Vox Lux
    Wrapped up in Portman’s like-it-or-loathe-it-you-cannot-ignore-it performance (I love it, for the record) and Corbet’s astonishingly confident filmmaking chutzpah — all fast-motion montages, off-kilter framing, and bravura soundtrack collisions between Walker’s score and Sia/Celeste’s pop tracks — it somehow becomes a jagged, messy but endlessly intriguing whole.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Suspiria
    It’s a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    Taken individually, there are cherishable moments and performances scattered throughout “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” like so many flecks of gold amid the silt. But as a whole, the film has to be chalked down to a perplexingly minor addition to one of the most beloved cinematic canons of our time.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    A Star Is Born
    The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    The Favourite
    This time the irony is of the tragic kind, and the stinging, wicked wit is tinctured with wholly new notes of tenderness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 91 Jessica Kiang
    Roma
    This is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    First Man
    Steering an astonishingly accomplished path between the small steps and the giant leaps of the Apollo 11 mission, reigning Best Director Damien Chazelle opens the 75th Venice Film Festival with First Man, an immersive, immaculately crafted, often spectacular and satisfyingly old-fashioned epic that may well become the definitive moon-landing movie.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    I Am Not a Witch
    Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Four Hands
    While the supernaturally-tinged plot may be outlandish, the commitment and confidence of the actors, and of Kienle in delivering what could be shallow twists with a surprising amount of emotional effect and psychological insight, give the film its melancholic, meditative texture.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Outrage Coda
    It’s a testament to Kitano’s effortlessly sleek, inherently watchable filmmaking (he reteams with regular DP Katsumi Yanagijima and uses the atonal descending motif of composer Keiichi Suzuki’s score to good effect) that you’re just about kept in your seat throughout all the speechifying.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
    It’s possible that the film’s passing pleasures are so rich that we don’t even notice how deep Okada has driven her storytelling dagger until she pulls it out in the end, and the tears come, adding, to the bitterness and sweetness of this moving and strange little fable, a hefty dose of salt.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Jessica Kiang
    Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
    This affectionate portrait avoids the major pitfall of comparable docs like Asif Kapadia‘s “Amy” or Kevin Macdonald‘s recent “Whitney” in that it steadfastly refuses to make Williams’ death the defining aspect of his life.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    Winter Brothers
    While we may not always know what Pálmason means, there’s the undeniable sense that he does, and mostly, that’s enough to add up to an impressively original, auspiciously idiosyncratic debut, one that scratches away at truths about masculinity, lovelessness and isolation, that are no less true for being all but inexpressible.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Jessica Kiang
    Touch Me Not
    Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 67 Jessica Kiang
    The Wild Pear Tree
    It’s a beautiful, moving finale but it hardly needed all the digressions en route, which basically amount to Ceylan taking the very long (and often scenic) way round to arrive at the simple conclusion that the wild pear does not, after all, fall so very far from the tree.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    Birds of Passage
    Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Treat Me Like Fire
    Monge’s deliciously seedy first film is light on originality but heavy on atmospherics: a sleazy, sultry, saxophone-blare echoing down a Parisian metro tunnel at night.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    The Trouble with You
    Haenel’s role is a mercurial one, full of opportunities for Clouseau-esque following sequences, mistaken identity mixups, and bumbling acts of well-meaning quirk. But there’s something resolutely un-ditzy about the actress, with her matter-of-fact sexiness and earthy intelligence grounding even the screenplay’s most contrived moments. It is a pleasure to watch her face as she works things out.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »