Justin Chang

1. Article · Sep 30, 2026 · Justin Chang

   Tom Cruise Is a Scream—and a Gas—in “Digger” (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Critical tone · English

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   Digger Rockwell is a funny name to give an oil tycoon. Like nearly every joke and jab in “Digger,” a doomsday-themed comic fantasia from the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, it feels both on the nose and slightly off, as if the script had started with something more obvious—say, Driller Rockefeller—and then bent it awkwardly sideways. The name carries a rich legacy; over Digger’s mantelpiece hangs a shovel with which his grandfather struck black gold in Texas, in 1917. A scion of no

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2. Article · Sep 25, 2026 · Justin Chang

   The Predator Catcher Turns Predatory in “Primetime” (opens the original)

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   The title of “Primetime,” Lance Oppenheim’s thriller about the making and unmaking of the scuzzy reality-TV phenomenon “To Catch a Predator,” tells us we’re watching a period piece. The period is 2006, when the golden age of streamable content is barely a speck on the media horizon. YouTube is less than a year old, Netflix is a DVD-by-mail service, and a prime-time slot is still one of the most coveted jewels in broadcast television. Of the many throwback jolts that “Primetime” a

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3. Article · Sep 11, 2026 · Justin Chang

   “The Uprising” Is a Grim But Scattershot History Lesson (opens the original)

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   In “The Uprising,” a new film from the British director and screenwriter Paul Greengrass, we never learn the protagonist’s name. He is a poor country farmer, mired in the feudal miseries of fourteenth-century England. We first encounter him in a state of mud-caked, mad-eyed exhaustion, working a wretched plot of land that, for some time now, has yielded nothing in response to his labors. Some distance away are the grave markers of his wife and children, victims of the Black Death. All who

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4. Article · Sep 4, 2026 · Justin Chang

   The Blockbuster Audacity of “Hope” (opens the original)

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   At the start of the giddily entertaining monster movie “Hope,” the director and screenwriter Na Hong-jin serves up a load of bull. No, really. We’re on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone, and a large male bovine has been found slashed to death near an open field. Flies buzz over the rotting carcass, which is riven by claw marks so unnaturally deep that no one can determine whomauledit. A bear? Unlikely. Maybe, one man suggests, it was that tiger from the north—the one that,

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5. Article · Aug 17, 2026 · Justin Chang

   “The End of Oak Street” Is a Weirdly Alienated Jurassic Lark (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Neutral tone · English

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   The tough, steely competence of Anne Hathaway—the sense that her characters could shoulder the weight of the world, without complaint and on short notice—has been one of the more welcome recurring spectacles of this moviegoing year. No, she couldn’t save the recent “Mother Mary,” a tedious, logorrheic folly, in which she played a pop star in serious need of a new dress, some counselling, and a much better script. But she was unsurprisingly winning in “The Devil Wears Prada 2”: Hath

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