Justin Chang

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Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Variety
For 1,779 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: 1,080 out of 1779
  2. Mixed: 572 out of 1779
  3. Negative: 127 out of 1779
1779 movie reviews
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    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Malcolm & Marie
    Zendaya . . . has a way of rendering dialogue irrelevant. She holds a closeup here more skillfully and naturally than her co-star does, and her silence proves far more eloquent than his words. And those words turn out to be the undoing of Malcolm & Marie, not just because there are so many of them, but because they feel like the building blocks of a meta-movie parlor trick, an intellectual exercise that exists for no purpose other than its own justification.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Tasting Menu
    Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Justin Chang
    Just Before I Go
    Dull and tamped down throughout, Scott convinces well enough as a guy who wants be put out of his misery, and there isn’t an actor here who doesn’t look ready to join him.
    • 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
    The Captive
    The deftness with which the helmer manipulated time in his earlier pics eludes him in this generic procedural context... leaving us with obfuscation but no genuine sense of mystery.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Rage
    Proficiently made but fatally unpersuasive in its portrayal of internecine gang warfare, this thuggish melodrama piles on the foreign accents and paint-by-numbers brutality, all served up with a grim, operatic self-seriousness that gives Cage’s antihero little room to maneuver.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Justin Chang
    Scary Movie 5
    Audiences not inclined to laugh at the sight of a baby’s head catching fire are encouraged to at least chuckle at the various gags made at the expense of Jody and Dan’s housekeeper (a game Lidia Porto), who satisfies many of the picture’s comedic-target prerequisites by being plus-sized, hysterically religious and Latina.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Chappie
    Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    A Thousand Words
    Alas, even Murphy's largely wordless, physically adroit performance can't redeem this tortured exercise in high-concept spiritualist hokum.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    God's Pocket
    John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Justin Chang
    Zoolander 2
    The results may delight those who believe recycled gags and endless cameos to be the very essence of great screen comedy, but everyone else will likely recognize Stiller’s wannabe Magnum opus as a disappointment-slash-misfire, the orange mocha crappuccino of movie sequels.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Dealin' with Idiots
    For once, truth in advertising: Dealin’ With Idiots spends 83 minutes doing exactly that.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Justin Chang
    Home Sweet Hell
    Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Elsa & Fred
    For a movie that’s ostensibly about casting off the shackles of old age and embracing excitement in life, there isn’t a single moment here that feels original or spontaneous.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Heatstroke
    An underwhelming survival thriller.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    New Order
    Franco pursues this nihilistic thesis with a single-mindedness that one might call rigorous if it didn’t also feel so lazy.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Igor
    With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Justin Chang
    Jojo Rabbit
    Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Wicked: For Good
    By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day
    Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Butt Boy
    Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Coming 2 America
    Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Tai Chi Zero
    Manages the curious feat of being at once relentlessly energetic and almost continually uninvolving; the title more or less sums up the amount of pleasure to be had here.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Death at a Funeral
    This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.
    • 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.
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