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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 93% | Burning (Beoning) (2018) |
"Burning" is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 21, 2018
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| 64% | The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) |
It is an intensely personal piece of filmmaking, a movie shot through with sneaky, unruly pleasures and no small poignancy.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 21, 2018
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| 100% | L'eau froide (Cold Water) (1994) |
What strikes you by the end of "Cold Water" is just how fast it moves, how swiftly our time spent with these characters simply slips away.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 17, 2018
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| 88% | Pope Francis - A Man of His Word (2018) |
It slyly dispenses with that old canard that we must know the artist intimately to feel moved, humbled and astonished by his art.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 17, 2018
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| 97% | First Reformed (2018) |
It is an exquisite piece of filmmaking and also a blunt, pulpy instrument, a despairing, fully sustained howl of a movie that is easily this director's finest work in years.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 17, 2018
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| 97% | First Reformed (2018) |
First Reformed is a stunner, a spiritually probing work of art with the soul of a thriller, realized with a level of formal control and fierce moral anger that we seldom see in American movies.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted May 16, 2018
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| 100% | Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) (2018) |
You feel for these fathers, mothers and children as they endure their mythic rise and fall, but the ruthless, eternal cycle of violence begetting violence leaves no room for sentimentality.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 48% | Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) (2018) |
Absorbing enough but lacking in any real sense of revelation...this undeniably gifted storyteller seems firmly stuck on Cruz control.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 88% | Donbass (2018) |
A brilliant formalist, Loznitsa likes to turn his camera on crowds in motion, turning each sequence into a collective indictment.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 64% | Summer (Leto) (2018) |
Far from an angry political screed, it feels both removed from its fraught larger context and shrewdly, poignantly attuned to it.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 80% | Sorry Angel (Plaire, aimer et courir vite) (2018) |
The lines have a consistently witty, acerbic sting; the voices we hear belong to men who are at once entirely comfortable in their skin and yet unafraid to discover new things about themselves.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 100% | Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018) |
This is an achingly personal story - the romantic leads are named after Pawlikowski's own parents, to whom the film is dedicated - and also a sadly resigned one.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 100% | Ash Is Purest White (2018) |
This is a movie about how time and circumstance conspire to make dazed, restless wanderers of us all.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 29% | Girls of the Sun (Les filles du soleil) (2018) |
Representational merits alone can't distinguish this movie's clumsy farrago of good intentions, ham-fisted story choices and cloddishly on-the-nose dialogue.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 100% | Three Faces (2018) |
"3 Faces" may be modest and low-key on the surface, but its surprises are worth preserving, its insights casually profound.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 95% | BlacKkKlansman (2018) |
If "BlacKkKlansman" is not above turning its characters into mouthpieces for its ideas, it wards off excessive didacticism by giving those ideas a heady flow and a sustained pulse. There's real, expressive joy in its anger.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 50% | The House That Jack Built (2018) |
Lars von Trier is a stupid, arrogant troll and, when the mood strikes him, a reasonably talented filmmaker. But there are only a few moments in "The House That Jack Built" in which his stupidity doesn't entirely overwhelm and negate his talent.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
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| 94% | Beast (2018) |
Pearce, in his feature directing debut, proves himself a solid craftsman, with a gift for giving even derivative story elements a nerve-jangling tweak.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 10, 2018
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| 87% | Tully (2018) |
It's one of the more viscerally accurate portraits of parenthood, and specifically motherhood, that the movies have recently given us.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
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| 100% | Day for Night (1973) |
A glorious ode to the fleeting, addictive and irreplaceable joys of cinematic collaboration...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
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| 94% | Zama (2018) |
A brilliantly discomfiting portrait of European colonialism and its discontents...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2018
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| 84% | Avengers: Infinity War (2018) |
Not even the threat of universal annihilation, it seems, will keep this assembly line from chugging ahead with its signature polished, mechanized efficiency.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2018
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| 94% | Zama (2018) |
This is one of the most atmospheric and transporting films I've seen all year, and also one of the best.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2018
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| 96% | Western (2018) |
Like its title, "Western" is both startlingly direct and full of resonance and ambiguity.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2018
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| 33% | I Feel Pretty (2018) |
I would gladly watch a version of "I Feel Pretty" with a less privileged celebrity in the lead, but I can't deny the sweet-and-salty verve that Schumer brings to this one.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 18, 2018
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| 80% | Where Is Kyra? (2018) |
This woman may be lost to the world, but in Dosunmu's quietly shattering vision, she is also unexpectedly, triumphantly found.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2018
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| 64% | Come Sunday (2018) |
A moving and intelligent drama about a schism that tore an American church apart, "Come Sunday" spends 105 minutes contemplating the nature of eternity.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2018
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| 97% | The Rider (2018) |
"The Rider" comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2018
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| 83% | Blockers (2018) |
What derails "Blockers" in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2018
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| 62% | Ismael's Ghosts (Les fantômes d'Ismaël) (2018) |
It's true that, even on a more complete viewing, not everything in "Ismael's Ghosts" coheres. If it did, I suspect the movie would not feel quite so alive.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2018
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| 75% | Mrs. Fang (2017) |
It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2018
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| 95% | A Quiet Place (2018) |
I can't recall the last time I found myself caring as intently for the characters in a horror picture as I did for the family in "A Quiet Place"...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2018
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| 88% | Claire's Camera (La caméra de Claire) (2018) |
"Claire's Camera" runs 68 minutes and is as slender and unassuming, in its own way, as a Polaroid. But you may emerge from it not feeling like quite the same person, either.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2018
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| 94% | Outside In (2018) |
Shelton has a knack for three-way relationship studies; she knows exactly how to braid together two characters in a way that comments insightfully on a third.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2018
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| 94% | The Green Fog (2018) |
The work of a sensibility as impish as it is scholarly, animated by a mischievous sense of the medium's possibilities.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 26, 2018
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| 79% | Unsane (2018) |
Soderbergh is one of the most dexterous directors working in the American mainstream, and he has a sly talent for lacing even a seemingly disposable genre offering with smart, incisive ideas.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 22, 2018
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| 43% | Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) |
Putting DeKnight at the helm hasn't degraded the enterprise; if anything, it has put the enterprise, glorified demolition derby that it is, into proper perspective.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 22, 2018
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| 89% | Isle of Dogs (2018) |
For better and for worse, it's Wes Anderson unleashed.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 21, 2018
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| 20% | Furlough (2018) |
What happens when you send Melissa Leo and Tessa Thompson on a weekend road trip? The talent pairing alone seemed tantalizing enough to warrant further investigation, and I wish "Furlough" had supplied a better answer.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 15, 2018
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| 92% | Love, Simon (2018) |
There may be little in this movie that you haven't seen before, but the perspective through which you're seeing it can make all the difference.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 15, 2018
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| 48% | Tomb Raider (2018) |
What makes Vikander's interpretation work is that this new-and-somewhat-improved "Tomb Raider" has been conceived as both a back-to-basics origin story and a smart, forward-thinking spin on a character with a tricky representational history.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 14, 2018
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| 86% | Thoroughbreds (2018) |
Spending 90 minutes with a pair of teenage sociopaths may not sound like your idea of entertainment, but these two are a peculiarly nasty pleasure to be around, in part because they seem utterly indifferent to either your presence or your approval.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
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| 39% | A Wrinkle in Time (2018) |
By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, "A Wrinkle in Time" is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 7, 2018
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| 17% | Death Wish (2018) |
To criticize Death Wish for its indelicate timing would be to suggest that there might ever be an appropriate moment to see it.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2018
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| 100% | Oh Lucy! (2018) |
Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2018
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| 72% | Double Lover (L'amant double) (2018) |
What gives the film its surprising coherence is not only the fluidity of Ozon's technique but also his mastery of tone, the ease with which he applies serious craft to a resolutely un-serious endeavor.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Feb 27, 2018
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| 82% | Game Night (2018) |
A four-hour documentary pitting Bateman against McAdams in an epic Settlers of Catan match-up would have been significantly more interesting ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Feb 22, 2018
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| 87% | Annihilation (2018) |
It gives itself, and the audience, an awful lot to see.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Feb 22, 2018
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| 69% | Golden Exits (2018) |
A movie that gazes deep into its characters' unhappiness and emerges with something searching, sad - and perilously close to likable.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
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| 81% | The Party (2018) |
Demonstrates what can happen when a filmmaker takes on a well-worn cinematic subgenre - the dinner party gone horribly wrong - and strips it down to its blistering bare-bones essence.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
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