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Justin Chang
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
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Good One (2024) |
Good One is a reminder that there are always smart, interesting films being released, if you’re willing to look beyond the obvious. As it turns out, looking beyond the obvious is something that the writer-director India Donaldson has a real knack for. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 08, 2024
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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) |
I’m not entirely immune to the charms of this approach; there’s one casting choice, in particular, that made me smile, almost in spite of myself. It’s not enough to make the movie feel like less of a self-cannibalizing slog. - NPR
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| Posted Aug 01, 2024
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Longlegs (2024) |
Part of what makes the film so effective is that it doesn’t really depend on secrets or surprises. The writer and director Osgood Perkins summons an atmosphere of dread so intense, it’s practically spoiler-proof. - NPR
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| Posted Jul 19, 2024
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Green Border (2023) |
With pulse-pounding sweep and moral fury, the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland turns her camera on injustice at the Polish-Belarusian border. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 28, 2024
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Music (2023) |
In unfurling the story of a boy who becomes a killer, a lover, and a singer, the German director Angela Schanelec continues to move to her own inimitable beat. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 28, 2024
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Janet Planet (2023) |
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler play a mother and her eleven-year-old daughter in a story that quietly sidesteps coming-of-age drama conventions. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 15, 2024
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Inside Out 2 (2024) |
As in the first movie, the goal is to strive for balance, embrace complexity and learn to be OK with imperfection. I’m trying to do that myself with Inside Out 2, which, despite its many pleasures, is a pretty imperfect movie. - NPR
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| Posted Jun 14, 2024
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The Dead Don't Hurt (2023) |
One of the many charms of The Dead Don’t Hurt is that you can’t immediately tell whether it’s trying to be an old-fashioned Western or a revisionist one. - NPR
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| Posted May 31, 2024
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The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024) |
The movie becomes a bathetic wallow in Holocaust imagery, drowned in an Alexandre Desplat score whose every surge turned my heart increasingly to stone. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Marcello Mio (2024) |
In this trifling meta-comedy from the French filmmaker Christophe Honoré, the actress Chiara Mastroianni embarks on a strainedly whimsical personal odyssey to examine the legacy of her late father, the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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The Apprentice (2024) |
Donald Trump’s attorneys have threatened legal action to block the release of this drama... It speaks to the useless proficiency of Ali Abbasi’s movie that the prospect of such censorship provokes more indifference than outrage. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Wild Diamond (2024) |
The movie glancingly suggests the soul-rotting effects of beauty worship, but it falls victim to the trap that Liane is trying to avoid: in a sea of worthy candidates, it doesn’t especially stand out. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Parthenope (2024) |
[Parthenope is] played by Celeste Dalla Porta, a great beauty indeed and an empathetic screen presence, though only fitfully does her character seem worthy of this movie’s epic enshrinement. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie (2024) |
Why make a film about Eduard Limonov, the globe-trotting Russian dissident poet and punk provocateur reviled for his pro-fascist sympathies? The filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov never musters a satisfying answer in this muddled English-language bio-pic. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Beating Hearts (2024) |
The result is much too long at nearly three hours, but I can’t say I didn’t warm to its rambunctious cornball charm. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Bird (2024) |
The story may lose you -- as it lost me -- with a magical-realist turn that magnifies, rather than minimizes, the tortured-animal symbolism that has often dogged Arnold’s work. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness (2024) |
The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos scales back -- but goes long -- with a sprawling, increasingly tedious compendium of comic cruelty. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Three Kilometres to the End of the World (2024) |
Though the movie is persuasive enough as an indictment of small-town religious fundamentalism and homophobia, it proves curiously incurious about Adi’s perspective, to the detriment of its own human pulse. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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The Girl with the Needle (2024) |
It’s a bitterly hard-to-stomach brew of a movie, at once hideous and beautifully made, with a chilling supporting turn by Trine Dyrholm. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Oh Canada (2024) |
Schrader bravely forsakes the narrative fastidiousness of his recent work and takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning, to formally ragged but sincerely moving effect. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Emilia Perez (2024) |
I was disarmed from the start by Audiard’s quasi-Almodóvarian vibes, his touchingly imperfect embrace of song-and-dance stylization, and, most of all, his three leads. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Motel Destino (2024) |
Set at a seedy roadside motel where the clientele never stops moaning, it’s a feverishly shambling erotic thriller starring three very game actors in a romantic triangle that plays like James M. Cain with sex toys. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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The Substance (2024) |
Whether the outlandish premise and its blood-gushing fallout withstand intellectual scrutiny, there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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The Shrouds (2024) |
A drolly fluid inspection of classic Cronenberg themes -- the deterioration of the flesh, the instability of the image, the paranoia-inducing incursions of technology into every aspect of life -- but imbued with a nakedly personal dimension. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Anora (2024) |
Baker’s multifaceted love for his characters proves infectious and sustaining, as does his belief that acts of unexpected kindness can redeem even the darkest nights of the soul. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) |
A thriller of propulsive skill and blunt emotional force, marrying the muscularity of an action film to the psychological intensity of a chamber drama. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Grand Tour (2024) |
Its true fascination lies in the humid atmosphere and wanderlust-inspiring splendor of its East and Southeast Asian locations, ranging from Singapore and Bangkok to Shanghai and Rangoon. It’s a movie to get lost in. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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All We Imagine as Light (2024) |
As the first Indian feature invited to compete at Cannes in nearly three decades, Payal Kapadia’s narrative début would be notable enough; that the movie is so delicately felt and sensuously textured is cause for outright celebration. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Caught by the Tides (2024) |
It’s an achievement by turns fleeting and monumental: a series of interlocking time capsules, a wrenching feat of self-reflection, and a stealth musical. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
Even in moments when the CGI looks a little obvious, the mayhem is staged and shot with the kind of blissful coherence that you rarely see in a Hollywood blockbuster anymore. - NPR
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| Posted May 29, 2024
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Megalopolis (2024) |
After a thirteen-year absence, a great American director returns with an ambitious vision of a city—and a world—in need of renewal. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 20, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist (2023) |
As he's done before, Hamaguchi gives us characters who are too complicated and richly drawn to be reduced to any one type. Yet that doesn't explain how hauntingly different this movie feels from his other work. - NPR
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| Posted May 14, 2024
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Challengers (2024) |
A funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 24, 2024
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The Beast (2023) |
Even when it's not entirely clear where or when we are, Bonello's filmmaking is so hypnotic, and Seydoux's performance so subtly mesmerizing, that you can't help getting caught up in the flow. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 18, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
The more arresting its doomsday images... the more Garland's war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 12, 2024
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Coup de Chance (2023) |
It's a decently executed version of a movie Allen has made many times before, enlivened by Vittorio Storaro's elegant if overly burnished-looking cinematography. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 04, 2024
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La Chimera (2023) |
One of the pleasures of Rohrwacher's filmmaking is the way she subtly blurs our sense of time. La Chimera is set in the 1980s, but it could be taking place 20 years earlier, or 20 years later. - NPR
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| Posted Apr 02, 2024
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The Shadowless Tower (2023) |
Most of us realize, sooner or later, that we're more like our parents or other family members than we care to admit. But the movie articulates that truth with a gentleness that can take your breath away... - NPR
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Road House (2024) |
The movie passes from memory as quickly as it passes on the screen. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 21, 2024
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Io Capitano (2023) |
It keeps us close beside Seydou, and it discovers its most lasting impressions and deepest meanings in Sarr’s wondrous performance. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 07, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
Those of us who retain a stubborn fondness for Lynch’s much maligned adaptation will sense what’s missing from Villeneuve’s: an imaginative density, a hint of psychoerotic danger, the grotesque, teeming aliveness of a fully inhabited world. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 28, 2024
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About Dry Grasses (2023) |
“About Dry Grasses” may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 23, 2024
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Drift (2023) |
Erivo and Shawkat are wonderful on-screen together; even before Callie knows the full truth about what Jacqueline has been through, she seems to see and understand her in a way no one else does. - NPR
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Tótem (2023) |
This is a movie about a celebration astride the abyss, and, as it continues, it takes on the eerie power of a séance. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) |
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is an entrancing work of art, but it's also wise enough to leave its deepest mysteries unsolved. - NPR
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| Posted Jan 19, 2024
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Mean Girls (2024) |
Oh, how it tries, to the point where the original “Mean Girls” would be thoroughly justified in asking, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jan 10, 2024
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Occupied City (2023) |
McQueen and Stigter haven’t just excavated some not-so-ancient history; they’ve also made a haunting, magisterial tribute to a city they clearly love. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jan 04, 2024
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Ferrari (2023) |
Mann has composed an epic of bright racetrack sunshine and inky shadows, where long, meditative silences give way to feverish jolts of vehicular action. The storytelling has an unfussy classical burnish that feels nicely scaled to its time and place. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Dec 22, 2023
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All of Us Strangers (2023) |
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, “The Zone of Interest” leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Dec 15, 2023
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