Justin Chang

The city of Oakland, Calif., is experiencing something of a renaissance moment in the movies. You could trace it back to 2013, when the Oakland-born director Ryan Coogler made Fruitvale Station, his ripped-from-the-headlines drama about the fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant III. The Oakland renaissance continues this summer with Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You, two inventive, genre-busting independent features, each one about a young black man on a strange and harrowing quest for survival.

The war on drugs has gone from bad to worse in this follow-up to the 2015 film. Justin Chang says that though its "bigger and brasher" than the original, the story in this sequel doesn't fully engage.

Eugene Jarecki's documentary uses the rise and fall of Elvis Presley to track the ups and downs of America's past century. Critic Justin Chang calls The King a "feverishly analytical" musical essay.

The sequel to the 2004 animated hit continues the superheroic adventures of Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and their three gifted children. Critic Justin Chang calls the film "gorgeous" and "touching."

A new film offers a searing portrait of a family wracked by grief — and by mysterious forces. Reviewer Justin Chang says Hereditary is the most emotionally devastating horror movie he's seen in ages.

The latest blockbuster from Disney and Lucasfilm tells of the early adventures of Han Solo. Critic Justin Chang says the plot somehow feels both utterly inconsequential and exasperatingly busy.

First Reformed is a stunner, a spiritually probing work of art with the soul of a thriller, realized with a level of formal control and fierce moral anger that we seldom see in American movies.

Critic Justin Chang says Beast, a film about two lovers on an island where a serial killer has been terrorizing residents, is "engrossing from start to finish" — despite its genre trappings.

Justin Chang reviews the new film from Argentina, 'Zama' an 18th-century epic set in what is now Paraguay.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a shattered soul who makes his way as a thug-for-hire in director Lynne Ramsay's brutal and unsparing new crime film. Justin Chang calls the movie "superior art-house pulp."