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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    A Fantastic Woman
    There are moments here that arrest you with their hallucinatory power.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Shirkers
    A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    First Cow
    Suffice to say the plot’s every unfolding development is a deft and delightful surprise, and it may be the most suspenseful and entertaining demonstration yet of Reichardt’s rigorous attention to detail — her patient, genuine and remarkably cinematic fascination with the workings of process and minutiae.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Favourite
    Most of all you remember Colman, in a performance that achieves its power, in no small part, by utterly destroying our understanding of what power looks like. She beams and scowls, brays and bleeds, shatters and disintegrates. She rules.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Columbus
    What’s remarkable about this wondrously assured debut is that technique never overwhelms feeling, in part because Kogonada makes the two seem inextricably, harmoniously linked.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Sieranevada
    A nearly three-hour talkfest that plays out in something close to real time may sound daunting on paper, but if you can make it past the opening shot, you will find yourself gripped for the duration.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Women Talking
    What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Caught by the Tides
    The movie is, paradoxically, both artifact and construct; the instability of the image is precisely what holds it together. Jia’s sense of the ephemerality of the medium, and of the world that the medium reflects, has seldom been more stirringly profound.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    mother!
    The movie is a savage attack on the egomania that enables a director to fancy himself a deity, as well as the rotten patriarchies that govern the worlds of art, industry and religion alike, with Lawrence embodying the wise but perpetually ignored voice of the divine feminine.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time: The Imax Experience is a glorious cosmic reverie, a feast for the eyes and a balm for the soul in these angry, contentious times.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The pleasures of theatrical performance become more pronounced, playful and complex in Part Two: Walk With Me a While, which, as its title hints, takes a meandering but fascinatingly surreal turn.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang, weaving deftly in and out of his ensemble and revealing the characters’ interconnected relationships in piecemeal fashion, shows how the bonds of community and activism intersect, not always conveniently, with those of love and family.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Delinquents
    From unsettled beginning to wondrously open-hearted finale, The Delinquents is wise enough not to offer clear or easy answers, beyond its certainty that getting lost is the only way to be found.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    No Bears
    The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but No Bears — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Calvary
    Grounded by a performance of monumental soul from Gleeson as a tough-minded Irish priest marked for death by one of his parishioners, the film offers a mordantly funny survey of small-town iniquity that morphs, almost imperceptibly, into a deeply felt lament for a fallen world.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Saint Omer
    With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    About Dry Grasses
    About Dry Grasses may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Quo Vadis, Aida?
    Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Before Midnight
    Honoring all that was memorable about its forebears while taking the story to new depths of catharsis, Before Midnight stands as a unique and uniquely satisfying entry in what has shaped up to be an outstanding screen trilogy
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Boy and the Heron
    As you leave The Boy and the Heron, you may feel strangely bereft, emptied out in a way that I suspect Miyazaki both intends and hopes to console us against.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    It would be hard to overstate just how singular this picture feels in its seriousness of purpose and in its cumulative power to enthrall and astonish.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Afire
    Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    Minute by minute, it’s a roving, inquisitive, elegantly expansive portrait of an establishment whose many constituent and tangential elements — farms and markets, kitchens and dining rooms, chefs and sous-chefs, servers and customers — function together in a kind of whirring, bustling day-to-day harmony.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Private Life
    Jenkins constructs an entire narrative from little exchanges, reveries, complications and setbacks. With a mix of concentration and expansiveness that can take your breath away, she unpacks exactly what “they’ve tried everything” means.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Janet Planet
    If there’s a reason Janet Planet never succumbs to the rosy, banalizing glow of nineties nostalgia, it’s Baker’s ability to juxtapose multiple perspectives in the same static frame—a gift that feels closely rooted in her theatre work.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Tribe
    Sans dialogue or translation, each interaction effectively becomes a puzzle to be solved, and Slaboshpytskiy is brilliant at using ambiguity to heighten rather than dull the viewer’s perceptions. Even when the meaning of a particular exchange eludes us, a greater sense of narrative comprehension begins to take hold.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    MLK/FBI
    The brilliance of MLK/FBI lies in how effortlessly conversant it manages to be with the injustices of the present, without ever deviating from the injustices of the past.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Tokyo Story
    The movie...remains perhaps the wisest of family dramas, an experience as wrenching as it is restorative.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Zone of Interest
    The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.
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