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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    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Worst Person in the World
    Nobody here actually calls Julie the worst person in the world (that insult is reserved for another character entirely), but you can imagine her thinking it about herself as she considers the mistakes she’s made and the people she’s hurt. But over the course of this charming, wistful, ineffably tender movie, you also see her learn to embrace the possibility of good in herself and in every precious, unhurried moment. It’s time well spent.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Drive My Car
    Nearly every scene of this richly novelistic movie — which won the festival’s screenplay prize — teems with ideas about grief and betrayal, the nature of acting, the possibility (and impossibility) of catharsis through art, and the simple bliss of watching lights and landscapes fly past your car window.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Memoria
    If Memoria is a gorgeous reassertion of form, it is also a bold excursion into new territory.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Petrov's Flu
    While Serebrennikov may be banned from leaving Russia, his imagination, as well as his cast and crew, have been left gratifyingly free to roam: In its form-bending construction and surreal imagery, Petrov’s Flu plays like the work of an artist thrillingly unbound.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Justin Chang
    Space Jam: A New Legacy
    The movie is just a big, empty declaration of corporate dominance, a whirling CGI tornado that — like a much stupider Tasmanian Devil — ingests, barely processes and then promptly regurgitates everything in its path. It’s Upchuck Jones.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    For two hours it places Bourdain’s voice alongside the voices of those who knew him, as if they were still able to converse on the same spiritual plane. There’s beauty and solace in that illusion, even if the movie can’t — and maybe shouldn’t — begin to answer the unbearably sad question that haunts every frame.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Souvenir: Part II
    One of the more delightful surprises of “The Souvenir Part II” is that it’s both a sadder, heavier film than its predecessor and a looser, funnier one.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Mothering Sunday
    It never quite comes together — the decades-spanning connective tissue somehow feels both overstated and thin — but Husson’s skill with actors, among them Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù and the great Glenda Jackson, yields undeniable dividends.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    A taut, strikingly beautiful drama.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    After Yang
    The experience of watching it produces readily identifiable flavors and associations: It’s a gentle-toned family drama and a moody futuristic fable, with a faint techno-paranoid aroma, a melancholy mouthfeel and a lingering aftertaste of existential unease.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Stillwater
    McCarthy pushes the thriller narrative in directions more extreme and harrowing than plausible, bringing Bill and Allison’s story to an unexpected point of reckoning.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Annette
    It’s hard not to feel stirred, even moved, by the sheer improbable fact of this picture’s existence: Moment by moment, you’re held by its loony flights of lyricism and gorgeous images (shot by Caroline Champetier), and by the mix of sincerity, irony and Sondheimian dissonance that animates every sung-through line.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    No Sudden Move
    The result is a ride that feels smooth and bumpy in all the right places. You are pulled along by the seductive glide of Soderbergh’s filmmaking, by the jazzy riffs of David Holmes’ score and the suavity of the camerawork, only to be jolted into high alertness by the nasty, bloody surprises in Solomon’s script.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    Black Widow
    Like the young Natasha herself, Black Widow feels as though it’s been programmed into submission — and scarcely allowed to live and breathe before it’s suddenly over.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    I Carry You with Me
    Its imperfections and its beauties are inextricable from each other, and also from the sad, inspiring real-life story it has to tell.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    F9: The Fast Saga
    What Lin restores in this mostly solid entry (which he co-wrote with Daniel Casey, both stepping in for longtime series screenwriter Chris Morgan) is a sense of emotional continuity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    Even in a film that makes no bones about presenting its subject in a flattering, softening light, this 89-year-old stage and screen legend has refreshingly few qualms about saying exactly what she thinks.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Summer of 85
    Summer of 85 has the matter-of-fact sensuality and youthful focus of so many of Ozon’s earlier films, but it’s also a startlingly specific greatest-hits compilation from across the director’s tirelessly productive career.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Luca
    Luca is about the thrill and the difficulty of living transparently — and the consolations that friendship, kindness and decency can provide against the forces of ignorance and violence.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Justin Chang
    Infinite
    The script doesn’t reincarnate so much as it recycles, drawing freely on the nested realities of “Inception,” the free-your-mind metaphysics of “The Matrix” and the amnesiac-assassin revelations of the Jason Bourne movies. Maybe watch one of those tonight instead.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    All Light, Everywhere
    If perception has its limitations, this deeply sobering, stimulating film suggests, that may be another way of saying that it is fundamentally limitless. There is so much — too much — to see here, and no end of vantages from which to see it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Undine
    Undine is a poker-faced fairy tale, a fantasy wrought by a committed cinematic realist. It’s an example of how a filmmaker can take an outlandish central idea and play it beautifully straight.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    Chaves is a solid craftsman with a weakness for easy jolts, but also a gift for filling the frame with strategically unnerving pools of light and shadow; he can turn even a daylit room into something ominous and suggestive.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    The rhythms are uneven, the patterns of meaning often elusive. But they coalesce into a moving glimpse of lives lived and artistic legacies forged in the shadow — and sometimes the harsh, glaring light — of momentous historical change.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Cruella
    While its surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    In the Heights
    To call this movie assertive would be an understatement; to describe it as small would be a lie. At nearly two-and-a-half hours and with a terrific ensemble of actors singing, rapping, dancing and practically bursting out of the frame, In the Heights is a brash and invigorating entertainment, a movie of tender, delicate moments that nonetheless revels unabashedly in its own size and scale.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Justin Chang
    A Quiet Place Part II
    The relentless tension and close-quarters intimacy that [Krasinski] established in the first film can’t help but slacken under the weight of a swiftly expanding narrative.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Killing of Two Lovers
    Fast-moving and slow-burning by turns, The Killing of Two Lovers suggests that real life — and real drama — so often unfold in the in-between moments, in the anticipation rather than the actual execution of the next move.
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