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 |
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| 65% | Victoria & Abdul (2017) |
Queen Victoria may well have been genuinely interested in Indian life in general, and the life of the Indian man she befriended in particular. But this genteel, self-satisfied movie doesn't begin to share her curiosity, much less earn yours.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2017
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| 49% | Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) |
It pulls off the impressive feat of feeling both hyperactive and lazy.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2017
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| 95% | Stronger (2017) |
The movie is a straightforward, even familiar, tale of survival and recovery, but its grave respect for the unique extremity of its protagonist's ordeal cancels out any impulse toward exploitation.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2017
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| 70% | The Unknown Girl (La fille inconnue) (2017) |
"The Unknown Girl" is an imperfect but absorbing addition to the canon, a carefully plotted thriller of conscience in which Jenny spends most of the movie patiently and persistently atoning for her mistake.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2017
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| 82% | Brad's Status (2017) |
Starting from a single key insight into human behavior - the natural compulsion to compare oneself to others - White has spun a funny, empathetic and surprisingly grounded comedy that itself defies obvious comparisons.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2017
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| 68% | mother! (2017) |
You don't need a notebook or a theology degree to understand, on a fundamental level, the deeper sense that this violently irrational movie is making. It comes together beautifully in your head even as everything else seems to be coming apart.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2017
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| 91% | Sieranevada (2016) |
Nonsensically titled, formally accomplished and richly engrossing ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 1, 2017
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| 82% | Beach Rats (2017) |
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.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 24, 2017
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| 84% | The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) (2017) |
While I'm generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, "The Villainess" turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist's emotional and psychological history.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 24, 2017
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| 37% | The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017) |
Even those who try to lose themselves in the meager, mindless thrills of "The Hitman's Bodyguard" may be distracted, if not by the looming specter of current events, then at least by the movie's technical shoddiness.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2017
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| 91% | Marjorie Prime (2017) |
A seamless, unshowy weave of chamber piece and speculative fiction; at times it suggests a lo-fi companion piece to Spike Jonze's "Her" or perhaps an unusually soothing episode of "Black Mirror."‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2017
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| 83% | Patti Cake$ (2017) |
A hearty feel-good stew of hip-hop and tough love served up by the writer-director Geremy Jasper.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2017
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| 97% | Columbus (2017) |
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.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 68% | Annabelle: Creation (2017) |
When you find yourself anxiously scanning every background for suspicious activity, or wondering how a house full of people can suddenly seem so ominously quiet and emptied-out, you know the filmmaker knows what he's doing.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 85% | The Trip to Spain (2017) |
The least satisfying of the three, a sun-dappled test case for the law of diminishing returns ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 89% | Good Time (2017) |
At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas of Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, "Good Time" is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 55% | The Battleship Island (2017) |
It's when the various threads converge that the mechanical nature of the plotting and the thinness of the characterizations are thrown into sharpest relief.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 16% | The Dark Tower (2017) |
From start to finish, the movie exudes a stiff, joyless coherence.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 75% | Atomic Blonde (2017) |
"Atomic Blonde" may be a delirious exercise in outré nonsense, but it can also be a brutally effective action picture when the inspiration strikes.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 27, 2017
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| 83% | Detroit (2017) |
Tense, excruciating and entirely necessary ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 27, 2017
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| 78% | Brigsby Bear (2017) |
Scrappy and modest though [the] movie may be, it all coheres beautifully, and with a sweetness that never feels faked.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 27, 2017
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| 85% | 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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| 89% | Girls Trip (2017) |
Sexy, sharply written and beautifully acted ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2017
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| 50% | 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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| 94% | 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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| 69% | 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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| 93% | 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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| 85% | 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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| 92% | 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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| 80% | 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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| 87% | 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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| 93% | 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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| 43% | 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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| 98% | 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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| 22% | The Book of Henry (2017) |
Grotesquely phony and manipulative ...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 46% | 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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| 77% | 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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| 89% | 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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| 73% | 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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| 70% | 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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| 36% | 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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