Justin Chang
Justin Chang's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer when
published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Los Angeles Times,
Variety,
NPR
| Publications: | Los Angeles Times, Variety, NPR |
| Critics' Group: | Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 86% | The Midwife (Sage femme) (2017) |
"The Midwife" is an absorbing meander of a movie, prettily shot and a touch over-scored ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2017
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| 88% | Girls Trip (2017) |
Sexy, sharply written and beautifully acted ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2017
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| 55% | Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) |
When you enter the theater, you can pick up your 3-D glasses with one hand and drop off your brain with the other. All in all, you might not consider it the worst exchange.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2017
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| 97% | Endless Poetry (Poesía Sin Fin) (2017) |
There's something ineffably moving about seeing the filmmaker take stock of himself and his history as he gently nudges this traveling circus of a movie toward its next destination.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2017
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| 73% | To the Bone (2017) |
If there are few surprises along the way, there are equally few easy answers or miraculous breakthroughs.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2017
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| 94% | War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) |
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.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 12, 2017
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| 89% | Lost in Paris (Paris pieds nus) (2017) |
Cruel comic mishaps may be this movie's raison d'être, but they are softened at every turn by the gentle humanity of the city's inhabitants, and by the unspoken sense that everything will turn out fine in the end.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 6, 2017
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| 89% | A Ghost Story (2017) |
Opening in domestic contentment, moving through personal anguish and ending with a cosmic lament, it's a simple, wrenching story of love and loss that pries open a window onto eternity.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 6, 2017
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| 86% | Scum (1980) |
The visual equivalent of spare, brilliant prose that occasionally bleeds (and bleeds and bleeds) into poetry.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 6, 2017
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| 74% | The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) |
The Killing of a Sacred Deer offers a grimly funny reminder that home is where the horror is. ‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 80% | You Were Never Really Here (2017) |
[Director Ramsay's] return seals her standing as one of our most fearless and forceful filmmakers, if not one as prolific as she deserves to be.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 73% | Wonderstruck (2017) |
Haynes ... puts a kid-friendly spin on his usual themes of isolation and frustrated longing in "Wonderstruck," an ingenious and often captivating adaptation of Brian Selznick's 2011 children's novel.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 89% | The Ornithologist (O ornitólogo) (2017) |
"The Ornithologist" is both an opaque narrative and a deeply inviting one.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 61% | Despicable Me 3 (2017) |
Close to unendurable.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 94% | Baby Driver (2017) |
This is movie craftsmanship and showmanship of a very high order.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 27, 2017
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| 78% | The Beguiled (2017) |
"The Beguiled" has some of the spooky, suggestive magic of a fairy tale.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 44% | The Bad Batch (2017) |
As a politically barbed fantasy, "The Bad Batch" is intriguing but facile; as a bid for cult-classic status, it's strained and self-conscious.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 97% | The Big Sick (2017) |
Invigorates the Apatovian formula and indeed an entire genre with a thorny study of interracial relationships and the bonds that hold immigrant families together across an ever-widening generation gap.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 15% | Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) |
Bay's visual sensibility has, if anything, matured, to the point of demanding and earning your exasperated surrender. He has a peerless command of the imaginative excesses of the Hollywood blockbuster.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 20, 2017
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| 23% | The Book of Henry (2017) |
Grotesquely phony and manipulative ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 48% | Rough Night (2017) |
The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it's also pretty apt.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 78% | The Hero (2017) |
Elliott's droll delivery and laconic charm are very much in evidence; he probably couldn't turn them off if he tried, though "The Hero" leaves you wondering if maybe he should have.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 8, 2017
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| 88% | It Comes At Night (2017) |
As he did in "Krisha," Shults avoids the conventional trap of exposition, relying instead on his striking command of the medium to evoke the inner life of a family under extraordinarily bleak circumstances.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 8, 2017
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| 77% | Beatriz at Dinner (2017) |
This queasily funny and suspenseful movie is more than a smirking exercise in ideological deck stacking, and to praise it for its political relevance would be to understate its subtlety and specificity.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 8, 2017
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| 84% | The Death of Louis XIV (La mort de Louis XIV) (2017) |
Serra has done his subject justice, transmuting the slow and steady march toward oblivion into an aptly imposing and unyielding work of art.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 1, 2017
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| 92% | Wonder Woman (2017) |
Director Patty Jenkins and her collaborators have taken the well-worn superhero origin story and invested it with a rich, sometimes revelatory depth of feeling.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 31, 2017
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| 76% | Berlin Syndrome (2017) |
Berlin Syndrome might look on the surface like a polished B-movie, a crafty and violent tale of a woman in captivity; but it's also the rare psychological thriller that feels not just taut and gripping, but genuinely exploratory.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 25, 2017
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| 71% | Alien: Covenant (2017) |
This movie may be a convulsively entertaining throwback to Scott's glory days, but to look upon Fassbender, with his icy and seductive post-human gaze, is to behold this franchise's future.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 17, 2017
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| 35% | Snatched (2017) |
"Snatched" may represent a failure of sensitivity, but it's an even greater failure of nerve.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 75% | A Woman's Life (Une vie) (2017) |
We warm to Jeanne's plight not because it is so relatable or familiar, but rather because every turn feels so vivid and so enveloping.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 28% | King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword (2017) |
There are some first-rate performances in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword," most of them delivered by computer-generated animals.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 86% | The Lovers (2017) |
Having a fling with a younger, hotter artiste type may be a midlife-crisis cliché, but it's one that writer-director Jacobs invests with real flesh, blood and feeling ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 4, 2017
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| 50% | The Dinner (2017) |
"The Dinner" turns a high-end double date into a seething evisceration of the upper class and the moral rot lurking beneath its well-heeled facade.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 4, 2017
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| 100% | Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) |
Monumental ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 4, 2017
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| 84% | Risk (2017) |
The achievement - and the frustration - of this sleek, searching movie is that Poitras' access often seems to obscure as much as it clarifies.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 4, 2017
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| 95% | Karl Marx City (2017) |
Epperlein and Tucker sift through these illicit materials - and forge their own fresh images and interviews - with an eye toward illuminating the truth and possibly even vindicating the innocent.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2017
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| 92% | A Quiet Passion (2017) |
It is through Nixon's brilliant performance that "A Quiet Passion" illuminates, complicates and ultimately transcends the mystery of its subject's confinement.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2017
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| 87% | The Lost City of Z (2017) |
An incandescent reminder that the world's most beautiful mysteries endure precisely because they remain unsolved.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2017
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| 96% | Graduation (Bacalaureat) (2017) |
Bleak, naturalistic and flawlessly acted, "Graduation" distills the mood and moral decay of a place whose gray skies and nondescript housing blocks feel like permanent reminders of its dark history.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2017
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| 66% | The Fate of the Furious (2017) |
The series seems to have at last entered its frustrating, decadent, spinning-its-wheels phase.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2017
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| 98% | Your Name. (Kimi No Na Wa.) (2017) |
The movie's spirit is by turns energetic and serene, impetuous and wise, its wild shifts from comedy to tragedy to romance revealing themselves not as tonal swings so much as variations in a larger cosmic pattern.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 69% | Gifted (2017) |
In attempting to balance the central conflict between Frank and Evelyn, a nature-vs.-nurture clash with a dash of class warfare, the movie comes up disappointingly short.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 100% | Donnie Darko: 15th Anniversary (2017) |
The movie feels perfectly timed to coincide with our nation's latest flirtation with the apocalypse.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 31, 2017
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| 45% | Ghost in the Shell (2017) |
Your head might not be spinning as you exit the theater, but your senses will be deeply and thoroughly ravished.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2017
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| 52% | The Boss Baby (2017) |
Not even a mealymouthed attempt at political satire is ultimately enough to rescue "The Boss Baby" from its pervasive sourness and paucity of imagination.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2017
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| 16% | CHIPS (2017) |
Can a movie be cheekily self-aware and still thoroughly terrible? Without a doubt. And yet damned if "CHIPS" doesn't somehow make the most of its own wink-wink awfulness.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 23, 2017
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| 45% | Saban's Power Rangers (2017) |
Bring Advil, or something stronger. It's morphine time!‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 23, 2017
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| 90% | Frantz (2017) |
More than once, "Frantz" hints that it will reveal itself as a homoerotic reworking of "Broken Lullaby." But Ozon has something simpler and no less intriguing up his sleeve.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 23, 2017
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| 43% | Song to Song (2017) |
The famous, finely chiseled faces that drift before the camera both fulfill and complicate one of the director's aims, which is to critique the fleeting temptations and soul-crushing consequences of fame, beauty, power and decadence.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 96% | After the Storm (Umi yori mo mada fukaku) (2017) |
A sublimely simple family drama from the Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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