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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Ahed's Knee
    Ahed’s Knee means to shatter your complacency, and also the complacency of its chosen medium. You could see this as a childish act of revolt, or you could see it as Ladiv, much like Y himself, refusing to submit to any agreed-upon parameters. He delights in coloring out of the lines, not least because he knows it will make all the right people mad.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Beasts of No Nation
    While Fukunaga creates Agu’s world with an extraordinary attentiveness to detail, he hasn’t quite found a way to approximate the novel’s radically childlike perspective, or to bridge the gap between this child soldier’s psyche and our own.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Monster
    This absorbing, ambiguously titled movie builds to a moving finish, one that reaffirms Kore-eda’s peerless skill at directing young actors in particular.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Zathura: A Space Adventure
    Its unwieldy title notwithstanding, Zathura: A Space Adventure is arguably the best adaptation of a Chris Van Allsburg book to date.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Justin Chang
    Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    “Oh, Toto, this doesn’t look like the Oz I remember,” Dorothy murmurs at one point. Truer words were never spoken.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Thunder Road
    Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Walking Out
    The Smiths may be working on a comparatively modest scale, but it’s precisely that modesty that gives their work its bone-deep authority and humanity, along with a refusal to indulge in violence for its own sake.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    IMAX: Hubble 3D
    This educational eye-popper should prove an excellent draw for science lovers of all ages.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Hustlers
    As Ramona, a one-woman supernova who reigns over a New York strip club, Lopez gives her most electrifying screen performance since “Out of Sight,” slipping the movie into her nonexistent pocket from the moment she strides out onto a neon-lighted stage in a rhinestone bodysuit.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Let the Sunshine In
    Denis and her writing partner, the novelist and playwright Christine Angot, have woven a sublime comedy of sexual indecision. They mine Isabelle's affairs for humor as well as heartache, and do it with such delicacy that you may be hard-pressed to tell which is which.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Life of Pi
    This exquisitely beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel's castaway saga has a sui generis quality that's never less than beguiling, even if its fable-like construction and impeccable artistry come up a bit short in terms of truly gripping, elemental drama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Kimi
    Soderbergh, shooting and editing under his usual pseudonyms (Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively), has a gift for satirizing corporate mundanity, and for making everyday minutiae mesmerizing. He can turn typing fingers and blinking cursors into the stuff of quietly engrossing drama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Witness
    The strength of The Witness lies in its recognition that the truth is often not just elusive but unattainable.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Keep the Lights On
    Delicately tracing the troubled nine-year bond between two men living in New York, Ira Sachs mines his own memories to sensitive, melancholy if somewhat muted effect in Keep the Lights On.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Another Round
    Another Round itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B. It sings, and it sparkles.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Brawl in Cell Block 99
    Vaughn’s performance is riveting in its containment, and he honors his character’s ethos by making sure that every word, glance, gesture and silence counts.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Priscilla
    With piercing matter-of-factness, Coppola ends this movie, her strongest in more than a decade, at just the right moment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    The Painter and the Thief
    The result is a movie that feels both truthful and evasive, deeply moving and a little perplexing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    i'm thinking of ending things
    You are advised to pay close visual attention, especially to Robert Frazen’s pinpoint editing and Melissa Toth’s subtly shifting costumes, even as you lean in to catch every word of Kaufman’s torrential dialogue and each detail of the mercurial, tinnitus-evoking sound design.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Enough Said
    Enough Said may be her cleanest, most polished and broadly funny effort to date; its emotional generosity is undeniable, but so is its tendency to smooth over some of the hard, brittle edges that have been the more interesting hallmarks of Holofcener’s work.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    A Different Man
    Schimberg may have concocted a madly inventive thought experiment, but to say that A Different Man merely deconstructs itself would miss how completely and satisfyingly it comes together. It’s a thing of beauty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    The Green Fog
    It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Age of Shadows
    Nothing in this gratifyingly focused movie feels excessive or gratuitous, and a situation that repeatedly threatens to spiral out of control is dramatized with the utmost assurance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Justin Chang
    Les Misérables
    Ly surveys all his characters without judgment, but a longer, richer version of this movie might have distributed its sympathies to even more powerful effect.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Kajillionaire
    Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Sujo
    [A] tender, harrowing and beautifully modulated coming-of-age drama.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Justin Chang
    Top Gun: Maverick
    Thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon.
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