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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At times, Juho Kuosmanen's film plays like a scruffier, less romantic version of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. There's tension to every scene, a sense that anything could go wrong at any moment. -
A media circus ensues when a man on leave from debtors' prison finds a handbag and returns it to its rightful owner. Motives are always more complicated than they appear in Asghar Farhadi's film. -
Director Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth is a bewitching piece of craftsmanship, featuring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the murderous power couple. -
Drive My Car tops Chang's list of the year's best movies, but plenty of other films made the return to theaters extra special. -
This is the first musical Spielberg's ever made, but he proves a natural: Few other American filmmakers have a more instinctive sense of rhythm and visual flow, or more direct access to your emotions. -
After his wife's death, a middle-aged stage actor forms an unlikely bond with the 20-something woman sent to be his chauffeur. Drive My Car is an intricately structured drama about love and loss. -
An enterprising teen and a 20-something photographer's assistant become unlikely friends — and then zig-zag from one comic episode to the next — in this altogether wonderful film. -
Jane Campion's Western plays out like a tightly wound psychological thriller, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as one of the scariest characters you're likely to meet this year. -
In a rare dive into personal territory, Branagh details growing up amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But despite some lovely moments, Belfast feels guarded in its telling. -
Stewart doesn't go easy on Diana, but there's an underlying compassion that never wavers as we follow the Princess of Wales during an especially miserable stretch of her famously unhappy marriage.
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Filmmaker Joanna Hogg conceived her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama The Souvenir as a two-part work. The second installment is a wonderfully generous movie, sardonic in tone but rich in emotion. -
Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel is undeniably staggering. But his Dune also feels rudimentary, as if he's managed his source material without fully mastering it.
