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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    EO
    In EO, the camera doesn’t just follow the story or record the action. Its restless, exploratory movements express a kind of shared consciousness, a spirit of communion among different members of the animal world, whether they’re running together in a field or sharing the same tight enclosure. It’s the grace of this movie to extend that communion to the human beings who pass in front of the camera, and whose fates are tightly bound up with EO’s, whether they realize it or not.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Rider
    With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Shoplifters
    A tender ensemble piece whose skillful performances dovetail into a perfectly symphonic whole, Shoplifters is a work of such emotional delicacy and formal modesty that you're barely prepared when the full force of what it's doing suddenly knocks you sideways.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Parallel Mothers
    The genius of Parallel Mothers lies in the way it gathers up so many of its maker’s preoccupations — the heroic fortitude of women, the tragic absence of men — and rewires them in an unexpected and entirely necessary direction. It finds Almodóvar doing something new by doing what he has always done well: finding grace and beauty amid suffering, and keeping memory alive.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Paterson
    What’s magical about Paterson — and what may frustrate those seeking a tidier, prosier experience — is its refusal to settle for clear answers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Ash Is Purest White
    Exquisite and ferocious.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Cove
    Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than The Cove, an impassioned piece of advocacy filmmaking that follows "Flipper" trainer-turned-marine crusader Richard O'Barry in his efforts to end dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Honeyland
    [A] lovely, heartrending movie.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    A Quiet Passion
    The stately rhythms of the dialogue — drawn out by the particulars of Davies’ blocking, framing and editing — become a kind of music. The effect is bewildering at first, then absorbing, then transfixing. Its purpose, in line with the loftiest ideals of poetry itself, is to clear the mind and stir the soul.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Tampopo
    It has the irresistible freshness of a recipe that many have tried to copy and none have matched: a barbed, sprawling, scintillating vision of a society happily in thrall to its taste buds.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Hard Truths
    Let no one, in their understandable eagerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist of the human condition, downplay just how entertaining Hard Truths is. Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Florida Project
    It’s the tension between hardscrabble realism and buoyant fantasy — and the understanding that they are both, in fact, vital aspects of the same experience — that makes The Florida Project so powerfully unresolved.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Zama
    Give yourself some time to adjust and Martel's style, at once immersive and disorienting, starts to feel like a corrective, a clearer way of seeing and hearing. The physical world here is not some abstract commodity; it is fiercely, palpably present, and utterly indifferent to the whims of men arrogant enough to think they can tame it into submission.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Ornithologist
    The Ornithologist” is both an opaque narrative and a deeply inviting one. Even as the film commences a series of radical formal and dramatic mutations, you are held rapt by the steadiness of the camera’s gaze and the sublime, sun-dappled beauty that it invariably discovers.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Cameraperson
    In ways both subtle and overt, the movie continually draws our attention to the human consciousness guiding every shot, the hand that is gently yet unmistakably manipulating the image.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    A poignant, sometimes piercing triptych of tales, each one predicated on chance encounters and romantic possibilities (the original Japanese title translates as “Coincidence and Imagination”), it finds Hamaguchi in playful, beguiling and quietly affecting form.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Benediction
    Benediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    A captivating 1930s-set caper whose innumerable surface pleasures might just seduce you into overlooking its sly intelligence and depth of feeling.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Petite Maman
    Petite Maman generates continual surprise and delight, paradoxically, by treating even the strangest circumstances with a wry matter-of-factness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Assassin
    A mesmerizing slow burn of a martial-arts movie that boldly merges stasis and kinesis, turns momentum into abstraction, and achieves breathtaking new heights of compositional elegance: Shot for shot, it’s perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film Hou has ever made, and certainly one of his most deeply transporting.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Silence
    Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Good Time
    At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas of Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, Good Time is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Amazing Grace
    Aretha Franklin didn’t transcend the gospel or gospel music; as first her album and now this marvelous documentary remind us, she did more than most to fulfill its potential for truth and beauty, devotion and art.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Shame
    A mesmerizing companion piece to his 2008 debut, "Hunger," this more approachable but equally uncompromising drama likewise fixes its gaze on the uses and abuses of the human body, as Michael Fassbender again strips himself down, in every way an actor can, for McQueen's rigorous but humane interrogation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Give Me Liberty
    Give Me Liberty is remarkable not just for its authenticity but for the way it serves up that authenticity sans self-congratulation. There are no showboating gestures here, only a bone-deep commitment to showing us the lives of individuals often relegated to the cinematic sidelines, to the extent that the movies even notice them all.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is often breathtakingly funny, but its absurdity arises from a powerful sense of outrage—a principled disgust with the stupidity, hypocrisy, venality, and cowardice of the modern world.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    If Beale Street Could Talk
    In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Carol
    Even high expectations don’t quite prepare you for the startling impact of Carol, an exquisitely drawn, deeply felt love story that teases out every shadow and nuance of its characters’ inner lives with supreme intelligence, breathtaking poise and filmmaking craft of the most sophisticated yet accessible order.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Walk Up
    Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.
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