Jessica Kiang

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For 528 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 39% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jessica Kiang's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 The Act of Killing
Lowest review score: 0 The House That Jack Built
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 24 out of 528
528 movie reviews
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Les Nôtres” remains — right up to its tight, repressed ending — a deeply disquieting, superbly performed evocation of a very banal sort of evil.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Kiang
    Clumsy, campy and kitsch, but also deadeningly dull for long stretches.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Kiang
    It is not only bludgeoningly nasty but also, viewed from a May 2021 standpoint, quite staggeringly un-prescient.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Such wild zigzags in tone — between bumbling physical comedy and lightly stinging satirical observation, between heartbreaking vulnerability and bursts of gleefully vicious, slickly choreographed violence — ought not to work at all. And yet they do, thanks to Jensen’s calm, slightly wry command of the story, and a cast that have all understood the assignment, even when their respective assignments are all quite different.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    An enjoyable, absorbing, characterful testament to shuffling the whole deck of genre conventions, and then politely setting it on fire.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Like any weird internet rabbit hole you might fall down when you know you should be reading a book or brewing kombucha or going to sleep, this thriller is almost annoyingly slick and moreish.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    The Perfect Candidate doesn’t burn the veil, but it does lift it briefly, allowing us a glimpse of Saudi womanhood that is idiosyncratic and individual — in short, as we very rarely see it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    Its sincerity and solidity are never in doubt — the actor’s directorial career is certainly off to a clean-lined, competent start. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the sort of film that fond parents wish their children would love, as opposed to a film their children actually will love.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    The three leads summon lovely chemistry, re-creating a dorky-kid dynamic in later life that feels like the perfect summation of the film’s almost Spielbergian belief that at 10 years of age we are our best and truest selves.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    For the most part, aside from a slightly slack start, and its stirring but simplistic ending, that kind of well-researched procedural detail is what makes Penna’s film such an engrossing and surprisingly touching addition to a genre already bursting with splashier, more extravagant and more overtly sentimental titles.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Kiang
    If it’s an ASMR video for pandemic-raddled emotions you’re after, you could do so much worse.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Kiang
    Reefa, based on an enraging, heartbreaking real-life event, paints over the colors, creativity and chaos of its true-life tragedy with layer of film-convention formula
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Kiang
    Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    Despite Crampton and Fessenden’s game playing, and a few nicely icky practical effects, “Jakob’s Wife” feels strangely anemic, which, as we all know is more fatal to the already iron-deficient movie vampire than garlic, holy water and sunshine combined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jessica Kiang
    The most disturbing thing about the impressively disturbing Rose Plays Julie may just be how satisfying it is.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    [A] lengthy but absorbing and illuminating documentary.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    We are active participants in the creation of this (or any) work of cinema. And given how much this movie loves the movies, as well as dogs, music, children, soccer, ice cream, the ancient Georgian town of Kutaisi, and the very process of falling in love, there is something immensely hopeful and moving about being thus invited to collude.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Kiang
    As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Kiang
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Kiang
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Kiang
    The purposely messy, garish and disposable comedy from Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as the fortysomething Midwesterners of the title, is so determinedly low-stakes that to quibble with its candy-colored craving to be liked is to be a terrible killjoy.

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