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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An uneducated sailor falls in love and finds fame as a writer — only to become disillusioned by his own success. It's an intensely political work, which London wrote as a rejection of individualism.
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Two new movies reflect on the passage of time. One is an up-to-the-minute account of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19. The other follows a family impacted by long-term incarceration.
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Radha Blank plays a fictionalized version of herself — a struggling artist from Harlem, who was hailed years earlier as a promising playwright. The film is gorgeously shot in black-and-white.
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The Netflix adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock's novel is grim in ways that can be both exciting and wearying: so many twists and betrayals, so many awful characters, so many horrific acts of violence.
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The relationship at the center of Kaufman's new Netflix film might not be long for the world, but the main characters are nevertheless awfully hard to get out of your mind.
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Ethan Hawke plays the famed Serbian American inventor in a new film that reminds us what a modern creature Tesla was — a figure from the past who never stopped pointing the way to the future.
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A new documentary follows 2018's Texas Boys State, a week-long summer experiment in which teens form their own representative democracy. The mock election highlights flaws of the real-life system.
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This mordantly funny horror film opens on a young woman who awakens with a terrifying premonition of doom. She Dies Tomorrow feels surprisingly in tune with our present moment of unease.
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Characters' living spaces are infected with dark spirits and become inescapable prisons in two new movies. Amulet is an intensely creepy revenge thriller, while Relic explores the horrors of dementia.
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Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti play misfit wedding guests who are forced to repeat the same day over and over again in a fiendishly clever comedy reminiscent of Groundhog Day.