Justin Chang

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Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Variety
For 1,781 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 39% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Justin Chang's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Fire of Love
Lowest review score: 0 Persecuted
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,082 out of 1781
  2. Mixed: 572 out of 1781
  3. Negative: 127 out of 1781
1781 movie reviews
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    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Death Wish
    Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Heatstroke
    An underwhelming survival thriller.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    A Promise
    Led by a trio of lackluster performances from Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall and “Game of Thrones” thesp Richard Madden, this awkward, passionless drama conveys neither the sensuality nor the drawn-out sense of longing required by its period tale of a young secretary who falls in love with his employer’s wife.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    It's a Wonderful Afterlife
    It's a Wonderful Afterlife is a movie to make Frank Capra roll over in his grave from indigestion.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Spirit
    Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Woman in the Window
    Adams tries, as always, to make intelligent choices, to underplay the intensity and avoid the obvious. She works against the freneticism of the filmmaking, emphasizing Anna’s moments of groundedness and lucidity as well as the instinctive empathy that likely made her a good psychologist to begin with. By rights she should be the centerpiece of a great and genuinely Hitchcockian thriller. This one is for the birds.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Breaking Point
    Overplotted and underwhelming, Breaking Point is the type of movie that finds it necessary to invent a far-reaching legal/political conspiracy just so one guy can redeem himself by overthrowing it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Secret Life of Pets
    Resisting the temptation to invest its characters and storytelling with any particularly winsome, distinctive qualities, the film quickly devolves into an infernally busy and overextended chase sequence crammed with desperately unfunny comic patter and noisy, pointless action.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Fifty Shades Freed
    If liberation is the endgame of Fifty Shades Freed, most of the time we feel trapped right alongside the characters, immobilized by the pointless, suffocating beauty and the stultifying dramatic inertia of the world James has created for them.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Big Significant Things
    It’s as hard for us to get invested in his journey as it is for the film to find a narrative foothold.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Hillbilly Elegy
    Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Underclassman
    So far-fetched as to make "Kindergarten Cop" look comparatively austere.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Dealin' with Idiots
    For once, truth in advertising: Dealin’ With Idiots spends 83 minutes doing exactly that.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Girl on the Train
    The empathy that Taylor summoned so effortlessly in his previous films feels strained and unpersuasive here, and moments that should be lacerating...are overplayed to ghastly effect.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Safelight
    A handful of solid performances and some subtle ’70s period detailing are hardly enough to recommend this flat, predictable drama.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Collateral Beauty
    This movie doesn’t rise to the level of so-bad-it’s-good. But no less impressively, perhaps, it’s just bad enough that you actually wish it were worse.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    No Escape
    Grittily propulsive filmmaking and solid performances from Owen Wilson and Lake Bell aside, there’s no escaping the movie’s hand-wringing manipulations and pandering sense of privilege.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Hitman's Bodyguard
    Uncertain whether to be a cheerfully weightless killing spree, an earnest odd-couple comedy or, most hilariously, a straight-faced Eastern European political thriller, Tom O’Connor’s screenplay falls back on shopworn snark and half-baked bromantic attitudes.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Rings
    At no point does the movie manage even a single sequence of sustained tension, or a frisson of genuine terror.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    The Paperboy
    A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Persuasion
    Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Stuber
    It’s not the clumsiness of the filmmaking that rankles so much as the hypocrisy.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The key to Seuss' tales, as with all good fables, is not only their cleverness but their surpassing elegance and simplicity, qualities that this busy, over-cluttered contraption of a movie seems entirely uninterested in replicating.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    That's My Boy
    All in all, it could have been worse. Puerile, crotch-fixated and very occasionally, inanely funny, Adam Sandler's raunchiest star vehicle in years has a small saving grace in Andy Samberg's performance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Rigor Mortis
    The cause of death would appear to be visual-effects overkill in the case of Rigor Mortis, a flashy, incoherent and virtually scare-free Hong Kong horror exercise that marks the directing debut of actor, singer, record producer and fashion maven Juno Mak.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Red Notice
    A depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers “original” material these days, “Red Notice” plays one of those self-consciously convoluted, ultimately derivative long cons that strain so hard to seem breezily insouciant they wind up wearing you out. By the end, it’s the clichés that warrant a rest.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Hitman: Agent 47
    Insofar as Hitman: Agent 47 is about anything, really, it’s about the pleasures of being on location — from the gratuitous image of Ware taking a dip in a five-star-hotel swimming pool to the sight of Singapore’s staggering Gardens by the Bay.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Peter Rabbit
    The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Oldboy
    Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.
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