Justin Chang

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Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Variety
For 1,780 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: 1,081 out of 1780
  2. Mixed: 572 out of 1780
  3. Negative: 127 out of 1780
1780 movie reviews
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    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    I Swear
    For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Project Hail Mary
    The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Wuthering Heights
    Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    The Voice of Hind Rajab
    The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Jay Kelly
    Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Sentimental Value
    Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    A House of Dynamite
    The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Eden
    It’s hard not to conclude that, in the case of “Eden,” Howard simply isn’t mean enough for this material. His temperament is better suited to stories of heroic resilience than ones of greed, bloodlust, and cynical isolationism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Splitsville
    Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Eddington
    Really, the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Materialists
    I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    The Alto Knights
    Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Snow White
    Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Wicked
    Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Gladiator II
    We are not not entertained.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Kinds of Kindness
    It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Inside Out 2
    Yes, we all contain multitudes. And, yes, we must learn to take the bad with the good—a lesson that Inside Out 2 bears out more dispiritingly, I think, than its makers intended.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Civil War
    As a tribute to the work that journalists do, Civil War feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Freaky Tales
    It diverts for a while, only to dissipate almost immediately upon conclusion.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Mean Girls
    So why does it all feel so laborious and overworked, so frantically self-regarding? It has something to do with the insipid quality of the songs, none of which threaten to lodge themselves in your brain the way the first movie’s lines so effortlessly do.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Napoleon
    Its glimmers of comic rage and generous helpings of battlefield carnage, though patchily entertaining on their own, never coalesce into a coherent reason for being.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Dream Scenario
    It’s amusing, up to a point.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    The Holdovers
    The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Nyad
    The movie, to its credit, harbors few illusions about Diana’s people skills. And it has, in Bening, an actor with a natural affinity for rough edges and sharp retorts, plus an ability to make emotional sense of a character’s fury.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Saltburn
    Saltburn is shocking only in its puerility. No sophomore effort should feel this sophomoric.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    El Conde
    As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    Golda
    “Golda” feeds that time-honored tradition of watching a virtuoso screen performer vanish behind a famous name and a wall of cinematic artifice.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Shortcomings
    As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Haunted Mansion
    While there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS.
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