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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Director Adrian Lyne made his mark in Hollywood years ago with films like Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. Now he's back, with the story of a picture-perfect marriage marred by mind games. -
In Pixar's new animated film, a Chinese Canadian girl awakens one morning to find that she's turned into an enormous panda. Turning Red provides a lot to look at — and a lot of ideas to grapple with. -
Though Robert Pattinson is terrific playing the young Bruce Wayne as the most troubled of souls, The Batman comes across as an overly familiar blockbuster, populated by recycled characters.
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Peter Dinklage aches with unrequited love in this musical retelling of the famous Cyrano de Bergerac story. Cyrano isn't always the most graceful retelling, but it's hard not to admire its conviction. -
The Belgian drama Playground unfolds at a school where 7-year-old Nora watches her brother being bullied. The Chadian film Lingui, the Sacred Bonds centers on a mother whose teen daughter is pregnant. -
An agoraphobic tech worker stumbles on evidence of a possible murder in Steven Soderbergh's new film. Zoë Kravitz stars in this gripping story of technology, surveillance and isolation. -
At first glance, the commitment-phobic woman at the film's center may seem to embody stereotypes about people her age, but this perceptive Norwegian dramedy doesn't reduce her to those assumptions.
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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.
