Justin Chang
Tomatometer-approved critic
| Publications: | Los Angeles Times, Variety, NPR's Fresh Air |
| 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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| 83% | 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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| 90% | 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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| 61% | 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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| 69% | 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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| 34% | 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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| 86% | 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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| 93% | 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) |
Are you in the mood for love yet? Jenkins' movie will put you there.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 60% | Out of Blue (2018) |
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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| 82% | 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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| 93% | Widows (2018) |
Gripping, corrosive and superbly acted...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Sep 10, 2018
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| 100% | 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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| 74% | 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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| 95% | 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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| 86% | Non-Fiction (2018) |
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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| 41% | 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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| 28% | 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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| 76% | Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres!) (2018) |
A feverish, obsessive act of cinematic rehabilitation, a shoot-'em-up conceived in tribute to a peculiar strain of blood-spattered B-movies from the 1960s and '70s.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2018
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| 63% | The Little Stranger (2018) |
A slow-building shiver of a movie, "The Little Stranger" tells a familiar but pleasurably engrossing story.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2018
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| 91% | Support the Girls (2018) |
There are lines in Bujalski's script that might have felt right at home with a laugh track, but he mostly directs his actors to toss them off in a casual, offhand way. He does the same with his politics...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2018
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| 92% | Searching (2018) |
This may be the first feature written and directed by Aneesh Chaganty, a 27-year-old Bay Area native and former Google employee, but the intricacy of his visual design is matched by a talent for old-fashioned suspense filmmaking.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2018
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| 100% | Minding the Gap (2018) |
An intelligent and compassionate grappling with some of the most painful issues presently haunting the body politic: toxic masculinity and domestic violence, economic depression and a deep, existential despair.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 16, 2018
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| 89% | Skate Kitchen (2018) |
A touching ode to the rewards and challenges of female friendship...‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 16, 2018
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| 86% | Madeline's Madeline (2018) |
One of the year's headiest, most dazzlingly assured moviegoing experiences.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 16, 2018
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| 90% | Gavagai (2018) |
If language can mislead, Tregenza knows that it is hardly the sole mechanism for human understanding. He has made a film that, in more than one sense, is moving beyond words.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 9, 2018
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| 93% | Crazy Rich Asians (2018) |
This adaptation of Kevin Kwan's 2013 international bestseller is many things: a tour de force of lifestyle pornography, a slick, enjoyable divertissement, a surprisingly trenchant study of class and cultural difference.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 8, 2018
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| 46% | The Meg (2018) |
The Meg, stolidly directed by Jon Turteltaub, winds up proving a fairly obvious theory about its chosen sub-genre: the more massive the shark (and the budget), the lighter the scares and the lower the stakes.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 8, 2018
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| 50% | Sarah préfère la course (Sarah Would Rather Run) (2013) |
Sarah may prefer to run, but she doesn't get anywhere particularly notable in this determinedly flat character study.‐ Variety
Read More | Posted Aug 7, 2018
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| 96% | Wanda (1971) |
"Realism" doesn't entirely do justice to the world Wanda inhabits, which, for all the grit and grunge of its bars and diners and factory floors, is also a world of startling everyday beauty.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2018
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| 70% | Christopher Robin (2018) |
The lessons Christopher must learn -- don't work too hard, hold your most cherished memories close, love your family and friends above all else -- are nothing if not obvious. And, much like Pooh himself, always worth revisiting.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2018
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| 78% | What Will People Say? (Hva vil folk si) (2018) |
The movie becomes something more than just another tale of cross-cultural, cross-generational misunderstanding: a harrowing drama of emotional abuse.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2018
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| 49% | The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) |
"The Spy Who Dumped Me" wears its gender politics and its paean to female friendship with gratifying lightness, and Fogel keeps the action moving too briskly for even the missteps to leave skid marks.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2018
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| 56% | Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (Di Renjie zhi Sidatianwang) (2018) |
Dee is invariably the most sane, grounded person in every scene, though once it's time to bust out the wireworks, he can leap from rafter to rafter with the best of them. It's the movie that never takes flight.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 26, 2018
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| 90% | Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018) |
"Teen Titans Go! To the Movies" is loud, cheery and fairly relentless in its assault on your rib cage. The pleasingly rudimentary visual design, all bright colors and madly expressive eyebrows, is no more and no less than what the material requires.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 26, 2018
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| 82% | One Sings, the Other Doesn't (L'Une chante, l'autre pas) (1977) |
If "One Sings, the Other Doesn't" is something of a thesis movie, that thesis takes shape gently, with equal parts documentary grit and dreamlike evanescence.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 23, 2018
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| 57% | Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) |
An initially clever exercise winds up feeling like the wrong kind of hackwork.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 80% | Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) |
The rare sequel so unexpectedly enchanting that it plays less like a rehash than a reclamation.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 76% | Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) |
Van Sant pays tribute to the restorative power of faith, discipline and perseverance, but he also resists the temptation to follow these themes into an overly pat or complacent groove.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 12, 2018
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| 98% | Eighth Grade (2018) |
More than anything, this emotionally unsparing but never-punishing movie feels like the work of someone who kept his eyes and ears wide open.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 11, 2018
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| 46% | Skyscraper (2018) |
If all this digital artifice accomplishes anything, it effectively heightens the irreducible flesh-and-blood realism of the movie's star.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 11, 2018
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| 93% | Sorry to Bother You (2018) |
Gathers up an eclectic range of influences... and pushes them rambunctiously forward, into a genre that might be described as intersectional screwball science fiction.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jul 5, 2018
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| 97% | Three Identical Strangers (2018) |
Three Identical Strangers reminds us that even the most galvanizing visual evidence can be deceiving.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2018
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| 63% | Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) |
The trouble with this muscular, fitfully absorbing, confusingly titled action movie - a bigger, brasher and less memorable picture than its predecessor in every respect - is that its cynicism too often feels like a put-on.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 28, 2018
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| 88% | Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) |
You might wish the whole movie had found a way to go quantum; you'll certainly long for more Pfeiffer, who has too few scenes but invests each of them with her usual luminosity.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 27, 2018
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| 51% | Boundaries (2018) |
It's hard to recall a recent movie with more exclamatory dialogue than "Boundaries" - "I know how much you must hate me!" "You can't live without being a victim!" - and less in the way of actual emotional revelation.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 21, 2018
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| 71% | Damsel (2018) |
"Damsel" is a deadpan art-western prank, a sly fusion of classical technique and postmodern sensibility.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 21, 2018
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| 47% | Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018) |
A somber, moving portrait of one of the early church's most significant figures, who led the way at a time when Christians were being burned alive in the streets of Rome, or condemned to death in the arena.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 14, 2018
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| 49% | Superfly (2018) |
How Youngblood Priest deals with the Man this time around may be the stuff of purest revenge fantasy, but it also touches a nerve that is hard to dismiss as anything but real.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 12, 2018
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| 83% | Nancy (2018) |
Rather than defaulting to either condemnation or absolution, "Nancy" instead holds out the fleeting possibility of love to someone who has never known it before - and asks why we should begrudge her the impulse to seize it.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2018
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| 89% | Hereditary (2018) |
A devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.‐ Los Angeles Times
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2018
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