Justin Chang
Justin Chang is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Fresh Air, and a regular contributor to KPCC's FilmWeek. He previously served as chief film critic and editor of film reviews for Variety.
Chang is the author of FilmCraft: Editing, a book of interviews with seventeen top film editors. He serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
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The latest blockbuster from Disney and Lucasfilm tells of the early adventures of Han Solo. Critic Justin Chang says the plot somehow feels both utterly inconsequential and exasperatingly busy.
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Disney's Lion Kingis so realistic-looking that, paradoxically, you can't believe a moment of it. The computer-generated blockbuster feels like the world's most expensive safari-themed karaoke video. -
Awkwafina stars in Lulu Wang's funny ensemble drama about a Chinese American family and their elaborate ruse to pay respects to their matriarch — without ever letting on she has a terminal illness. -
An American couple attends a mysterious festival in the Swedish countryside in Ari Aster's new thriller. The haunting, hypnotic film will slowly seep into your nervous system. -
The breezy rom-com is set in a world where only one man remembers the fab four. The film so takes our affection for The Beatles for granted that it never bothers to give the music a proper showcase. -
Though it's as dazzling as you'd expect from a Pixar animation, Toy Story 4is also more ungainly than its predecessors, with coarser humor and audacious plot leaps that don't always pay off. -
Jimmie Fails plays a man who continues to visit the old Victorian house he grew up in — even though his family no longer owns it — in this comic fable about the toll of gentrification.
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Emma Thompson stars as a talk show host who hires Molly (Mindy Kaling) to join a writers room full of white men. But the film falls short in reconciling its satire with its more sentimental moments.
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Joanna Hogg's movie, which centers on a young film student, is the first of a projected two-part drama drawing from Hogg's life. It won the top prize in Sundance's world cinema dramatic competition.
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Writer-director Olivier Assayas has a knack for turning abstract ideas into stimulating cinema — which is exactly what he does in Non-Fiction, a modern-day talkfest centering on the Parisian elite.
