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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Amrum
    The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Exit 8
    Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Christophers
    The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Hoppers
    Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Ghost Elephants
    Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Pompei: Below the Clouds
    In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Crime 101
    There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.
    • 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
    • 90 Justin Chang
    28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Justin Chang
    The Voice of Hind Rajab
    The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    All That's Left of You
    Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    The Testament of Ann Lee
    I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Magellan
    Magellan isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Young Mothers
    The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Resurrection
    Resurrection, a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It’s more like a love labyrinth—a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    No Other Choice
    [Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Is This Thing On?
    Is This Thing On? isn’t a dishy, insider’s view of the New York comedy scene, and it isn’t trying to be. It knows that its best material lies elsewhere.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Hamnet
    It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Sound of Falling
    The Berlin-born director Mascha Schilinski, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Peter, is a bit of a prankster herself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker wield the tools of her craft with such an ingenious and committed sense of mischief.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Sirât
    The movie begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair, and what unfolds in between is an experience of singularly turbulent and transfixing power; for sheer visceral excitement and sustained emotional force, I haven’t encountered its equal this year. It’s an extraordinarily propulsive piece of filmmaking, and every moment of it is suffused with feeling.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Frankenstein
    Del Toro’s empathy for the Creature is total—and so, owing to the aching poignancy and underlying rage of Elordi’s performance, is ours.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Bugonia
    This movie offers an uncommonly pleasurable descent into hell, and for that reason, I suspect, it will elude the criticisms that have been flung at two other recent provocations, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” and Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” both of which likewise sneered at performative politics and were attacked as noxiously reactionary.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    It Was Just an Accident
    It is, bluntly and unabashedly, rip-roaring entertainment, propelled by flurries of comedy, bursts of emotion, and sidelong jolts of social critique.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Byrne the actor turns out to be stretchable in the best sense; her performance is a marvel of tragicomic elasticity. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down a hallway in a haze, or releasing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera.
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