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
    Close Your Eyes
    I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    The Northman
    Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, The Northman is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Dick Johnson Is Dead
    This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    Foxcatcher
    If the screenplay, by Dan Futterman (“Capote”) and E. Max Frye, is relatively spare in terms of dialogue, it’s satisfyingly rich and thorny in its conception of the tightly wound triangle at its center, while Miller’s direction evinces the same sustained intensity and consummate control of his material that defined his first two features.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Justin Chang
    All We Imagine as Light
    One of the year’s great movies, in any form, style, or language.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Corpse Bride
    An endearingly schizoid Frankenstein of a movie, by turns relentlessly high-spirited and darkly poignant.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Godland
    The problem with this priest — one of them, anyway — may not be an excess of spiritual fervor but rather a dearth of it, a lack of reverence for the beauty that Pálmason’s camera exalts in every magisterial frame. Lucas may be a blind wretch, but the creation through which he stumbles is a source of never-ending awe.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Love & Friendship
    [Stillman] takes the inherent sophistication of Austen’s worldview and introduces just the right note of sly, self-deflating mockery.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Pain and Glory
    But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    The Lighthouse
    The Lighthouse is a ferocious battle of wills, a tour de force of cold, clammy suspense and a protracted descent into cabin-fever madness. It is also a gorgeous piece of film craft, a chance to savor the visual glories of a bygone era of cinematic artisanship.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Living
    Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Meek's Cutoff
    Working on a richer and more intricate canvas than she's previously attempted, Kelly Reichardt has pulled off a rare thing with Meek's Cutoff -- a low-budget period Western with a bracing feminist spin.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Beach Rats
    Harris Dickinson, the spellbinding British newcomer who plays Frankie, rewards the director’s scrutiny with piercing emotional depth and a startling lack of self-consciousness.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Happy as Lazzaro
    Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Poor Things
    Lanthimos may have cobbled together a rambunctious psychosexual odyssey from many Frankensteinian parts — a little “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash of “Metropolis,” a soupçon of Voltaire by way of the Marquis de Sade — but he and his skilled collaborators have marshaled them into a remarkably coherent and purposeful vision.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Light From Light
    Harrill is awfully good at ambivalence, at teasing out the feelings of people who are uncertain what they want and in no hurry to talk about it — a condition that afflicts more characters than we often see in American movies, independent or otherwise.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    October November
    A carefully constructed and beautifully acted tale of two very different sisters brought together when their aging father falls seriously ill.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Palm Springs
    For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Souleymane's Story
    The film’s considerable power depends entirely on its moment-to-moment persuasiveness, on a set of narrative and aesthetic choices that, as presented—in a series of swift, kinetically composed, and jaggedly edited scenes—seldom feel like choices at all.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Us
    Once again, the director draws upon the sketch-comedy gifts he honed on “Key & Peele” to achieve an artful, ruthless balance of horror and hilarity. Us is a tour de force of comic tension and visceral release, a movie that weaponizes our chuckles against us and reminds us that laughing, screaming and thinking are not mutually exclusive pleasures.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Happy End
    If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    Nocturama
    Bonello’s approach, always seeking to evoke rather than explain, doesn’t allow us either the clarity of analysis or the comforts of condemnation.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Justin Chang
    One Night in Miami
    The suspension of disbelief that any celebrity impersonation requires may be multiplied fourfold here, but One Night in Miami ... turns that excess into a kind of economy. It moves, with light-fingered assurance, through sequences that transform from soulful arias into sustained duets, built around performances that are collaborative rather than imitative in nature.
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