Justin Chang
speaker
1,518 appearances
49 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3d ago
Justin Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 26 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Fresh Air · Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones / Remembering singer Cassandra Wilson · 18 Sep 2026
podcast
Here is Justin's review.
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The South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin has directed four feature films over the past 18 years.
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They're terrific, if not for the faint of heart.
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I still remember watching Na's 2008 debut, The Chaser, and thinking I'd rarely seen a more brutally relentless thriller or a darker statement about the elusiveness of law and order.
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His next one, The Yellow Sea, was even better, a gripping mob movie that was also a wrenching portrait of a Korean-Chinese immigrant on the run, a man without a country.
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Na is a master of tone and genre, and there's a genuine moral undertow to his movies, even as they balance comedy, tragedy, and bone-crunching violence.
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Na's latest movie, Hope, is a big step up in ambition, if maybe a step down in finesse.
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It's been divisive, passionately praised and witheringly dismissed, sometimes in the same breath.
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It's a sprawling, big-budget monster movie set in a remote South Korean town that comes under attack from giant shapeshifting aliens.
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That made it an admittedly odd choice to premiere in competition at the recent Cannes Film Festival, though I was grateful for the genre movie diversion, and floored, as usual, by the robustness of Na's action chops.
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Even Hope's dumb stretches—and it has them, for sure—are touched by brilliance.
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The movie blurs the lines between schlock and art.
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It begins in a town called Hope Harbor, located near the border with North Korea.
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The surrounding countryside is full of barbed wire and undetonated landmines.
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The residents are used to being on high alert.
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Yet their most dangerous enemy hails not from across the border, but from the skies.
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Extraterrestrial monsters have descended and laid waste to the town.
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The local police chief, played by Huang Zemin, arrives late on the scene, and it's through his eyes that we see the destruction after it's already happened.
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But we don't see the monsters right away.
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For roughly the first hour of this more than two-and-a-half-hour movie, Na steers us through a dim labyrinth of damaged stores and homes, building up our nervous anticipation scene by scene.
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