Justin Chang
Tomatometer-approved critic
| Publications: | Los Angeles Times, Variety, NPR's Fresh Air, NPR |
| Critics' Group: | Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 77% | Mary Poppins Returns (2018) |
It sits there flailing on the screen, bright, gaudy and mirthless, tossing off strained bits of comic business and all but strangling itself with its own good cheer.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Dec 12, 2018
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| 97% | Bumblebee (2018) |
"Bumblebee," for its part, has just enough wit, playfulness and charm to develop a voice of its own, which is no small thing in the context of a flashy, lunkheaded studio franchise.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Dec 9, 2018
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| 83% | Ben is Back (2018) |
"Ben Is Back" may lose its way early and often, but it is rarely in danger of losing hold of your attention.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Dec 6, 2018
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| 64% | Vox Lux (2018) |
Portman delivers a master class in appalling celebrity misbehavior... It's an arresting, boldly alienating screen performance that destabilizes the movie even as it brings it together.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Dec 5, 2018
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| 80% | Never Look Away (2018) |
"Never Look Away" is nothing if not classical in its approach: It is stately and composed, clear-eyed and engrossing.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 29, 2018
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| 89% | Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice) (2018) |
Tardiolo's silent radiance and his director's offhand audacity produce their own bewildering cinematic alchemy.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 29, 2018
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| 98% | Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) |
What distinguishes "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" in the end is that it takes its mission seriously, even when it's being transparently silly.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 28, 2018
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| 95% | Amazing Grace (2018) |
Franklin's voice remains so pure and galvanic that [this] is one of the few movies you could watch with your eyes closed, though you would hardly want to.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2018
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| 94% | The Favourite (2018) |
[Colman] beams and scowls, brays and bleeds, shatters and disintegrates. She rules.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2018
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| 83% | Creed II (2018) |
The rare sequel that doesn't wind up feeling like the same old mistake.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 16, 2018
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| 88% | Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018) |
A witty, fastidiously imagined adventure and a touching, sometimes troubling ode to the power of friendship. But it also demonstrates some of the problems that can befall a movie when its vast ambition and confidence outstrip its finesse.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 14, 2018
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| 92% | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) |
As the Coens remind us, with their usual impish wit and impeccable craft, there's still a lot of pleasure to be mined from those conventions. But there are lessons to be learned, too.‐ NPR
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2018
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| 38% | Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) |
It offers up dazzling feats of sorcery and realms of wonderment and manages to conjure the very opposite of magic.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 8, 2018
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| 40% | The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018) |
By any title, the movie is an expertly crafted slog and a disappointingly bland return for everyone's favorite Scandinavian pansexual goth-vigilante cyber-sleuth.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 7, 2018
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| 82% | The Other Side of the Wind (2018) |
A cracked, corrosive, savagely compromised vision it unmistakably is. A mock documentary avant la lettre, Other Side of the Wind has a jagged syntax that would have felt startling in the '70s and, decades later, has lost little of its restless vitality.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 1, 2018
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| 80% | Boy Erased (2018) |
"Boy Erased" is a sobering, justly infuriating movie, but its own convenient elisions keep catharsis at bay.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Nov 1, 2018
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| 62% | Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) |
[A] sprawling, jumbled and disappointingly airbrushed new movie about the legendary rock band and especially its incandescent frontman, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek).‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 29, 2018
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| 100% | Shirkers (2018) |
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.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 26, 2018
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| 100% | A Bread Factory, Part Two: Walk with Me a While (2018) |
A warm and prickly humanist triumph that features no movie stars, disperses its attention across a large ensemble and feels meticulously handcrafted in every respect.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 25, 2018
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| 100% | A Bread Factory, Part One: For the Sake of Gold (2018) |
A warm and prickly humanist triumph that features no movie stars, disperses its attention across a large ensemble and feels meticulously handcrafted in every respect.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 25, 2018
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| 63% | Suspiria (2018) |
There is meaning in this mutilation and, if you don't regard the classics as sacrosanct, a grim, brooding sort of pleasure.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 24, 2018
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| 76% | Mid90s (2018) |
It longs to be received as an impeccable found artifact of its chosen decade, but also as a sly, knowing synthesis of its many obvious influences.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 97% | Thunder Road (2018) |
Remarkably, Cummings manages to piece these oddball vignettes into a vivid drama with its own unpredictable, startlingly lovely shape.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 94% | Wildlife (2018) |
If the drama feels somewhat studied - though it would be more accurate to say that it simply feels thought through - it is never airless or constricted. The story maintains a steady emotional pulse alongside its meticulous accrual of details...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 79% | Halloween (2018) |
Scary and propulsive, it doesn't just forge a direct link to Carpenter's original; it pretends all the garbage in between never even existed.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 15, 2018
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| 89% | The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) |
A deft and intelligent minor-key variation on a superb 2014 Israeli film of the same title.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2018
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| 74% | Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) |
The standout is Erivo, who will next be seen in Steve McQueen's thriller "Widows" and whose performance here is revelatory in the most rewarding sense.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 10, 2018
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| 92% | Mandy (2018) |
Cosmatos' metal-to-the-max revenge thriller is more than just the sum of its deranged set pieces, choice as they are: Its slow-drip blend of hardcore pulp and demonic fantasy has a patience and all-consuming conviction that simply cannot be faked.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2018
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| 94% | Private Life (2018) |
Even as Jenkins brings out the angst, her inner comic strategist remains hard at work, building sly jokes into the edge of the frame; she has a talent for rendering comedy and tragedy virtually indistinguishable.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2018
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| 28% | Venom (2018) |
"Venom" feels like pretty weak poison.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2018
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| 29% | Night School (2018) |
For all her improvisational skill and that of her top-billed costar, the much-vaunted Hart-and-Haddish pairing never pays dividends. It feels more like Half-and-Half.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 27, 2018
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| 83% | Monsters and Men (2018) |
A politically astute, emotionally layered examination of a violent death and its lingering psychic residue.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 27, 2018
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| 96% | Bisbee '17 (2018) |
Greene has made a hard movie to argue with, even as he invites you to do exactly that.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 25, 2018
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| 85% | The Sisters Brothers (2018) |
Audiard plays to his past strengths as a poet of wounded masculinity; in its most touching moments, "The Sisters Brothers" is like a hangout movie on horseback.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 20, 2018
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| 87% | Colette (2018) |
A witty, spirited portrait of the great French writer and libertine during the early Belle Époque years of her career.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 19, 2018
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| 67% | The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) |
At his best, Roth plunders elements from countless other tales of supernatural spookery... and nudges them eerily close to genuine enchantment.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 19, 2018
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| 73% | The Children Act (2018) |
It's always rewarding to watch Thompson bring her lucid wit and deep emotional reserves to bear on a meaty role.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2018
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| 33% | The Predator (2018) |
From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-your-face violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash-inducing muddle.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2018
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| 88% | First Man (2018) |
Whatever its missteps, "First Man" represents a principled attempt to reconsider what heroism looks and sounds like, to think beyond the reductive rah-rah parameters that have led so many to confuse jingoism with art.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 85% | High Life (2018) |
"High Life" can be brutal and breathtakingly perverse as only a Denis film can be. But perhaps even more disturbingly, that brutality is undergirded by real warmth and tenderness...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 92% | If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) |
In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker's embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 55% | Out of Blue (2019) |
Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 81% | Destroyer (2018) |
The grim relentlessness with which "Destroyer" seesaws between time frames - as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored - wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 91% | Widows (2018) |
Davis, who carries the picture in a way she has never quite done before, commands every scene with cold, ruthless efficiency; her gravity sells the story's preposterous premise to the characters as well as the audience.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 97% | In Fabric (2018) |
A movie of ravishing colors and textures that ultimately elevates style and sensuality into something genuinely meaningful.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 9, 2018
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| 68% | Beautiful Boy (2018) |
The detachment at work in "Beautiful Boy" suggests an attempt to speak clearly and truthfully, to resist the clichés of the addiction drama while acknowledging that those clichés can hardly be rewritten.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 9, 2018
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| 90% | A Star Is Born (2018) |
It's remarkable... just how many fresh reserves of emotion Cooper teases out of a well-worn formula.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 9, 2018
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| 85% | Non-Fiction (2019) |
The frame holds steadier here; it's the churning dialogue - funny, seductive, always carving out fresh tributaries - that propels you forward.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2018
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| 63% | Outlaw King (2018) |
The movie is a juicy slab of cinematic red meat, a symphony of mud, blood and viscera set to a soundtrack of thundering hoofbeats and howls of vengeance.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2018
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| 26% | The Nun (2018) |
"The Nun," shot in murky pools of darkness that often leave you squinting at the screen, is a dispiriting reminder that franchising evil inevitably dissipates its impact.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 6, 2018
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