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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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.
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Homosexuality and gender nonconformity have long been frowned upon in Chechen society. Welcome to Chechnya is a grimly ironic title for a documentary that plays like a chilling undercover thriller.
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Steve Carell stars as a Democratic strategist running for mayor of a small Midwestern town in a film that feels exasperatingly out of step with the present moment.
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Decades after the war, four black veterans return to Vietnam to recover a stash of buried gold. The timely film is a critique of the U.S.' long, shameful history of devaluing its black soldiers.
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Shirley mixes fact and fiction as it explores the life of the writer best known for the short story "The Lottery." This unusual film isn't so much a biopic as it is a biographical-literary fantasia.
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After journeying through England, Italy and Spain, comic duo Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take one final trip, playing fictionalized versions of themselves as they retrace Odysseus' famed voyage.
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Dennehy, who died April 15, plays a suburban widower who befriends a mother and her son in one of his last films. It's the kind of deeply lived-in performance that Dennehy was known for.