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Matthew Eng

Tomatometer-approved critic

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Hard Truths (2024) 95% EDIT “Through the vitality of Jean-Baptiste’s playing, Pansy’s wrath comes to function as a kind of wayward defiance, a fire-in-the-belly refusal to abide by society’s norms and niceties...” – Reverse Shot Oct 21, 2024 Full Review Good One (2024) 98% EDIT “Donaldson might have dwelled longer in her protagonist’s destabilizing uncertainty before delivering her film to its lightly vengeful conclusion, but the force of its final beat is undeniable.” – Reverse Shot Aug 13, 2024 Full Review Tótem (2023) 97% EDIT “It is this balance of pragmatism and fellow feeling that emblematizes the bonds between Avilés’s characters and makes her film such a graceful, luminous, and malleable portrait of love’s work amid mortal descent.” – Reverse Shot Jan 26, 2024 Full Review Last Summer (2023) 87% EDIT “This is a master class in emotional precision, one grounded in the knowledge that even the most durable of moral compasses can shatter in the face of a monstrous and deranging need.” – Reverse Shot Oct 13, 2023 Full Review Foe (2023) 24% EDIT “[A] cumbersome film, whose feints at fun and friskiness are unnervingly forced.” – Reverse Shot Oct 6, 2023 Full Review Passages (2023) 94% EDIT “As edited by Sophie Reine, Sachs’s latest advances with a violent precision, the better to cut to the core of these characters and their furtive connections. If Sachs’s previous films were slow burns, then Passages is a wildfire.” – Reverse Shot Aug 4, 2023 Full Review Past Lives (2023) 95% EDIT “Past Lives [is] the calm, clear-eyed filmmaking debut of the New York-based, Korean-American playwright Celine Song.” – Reverse Shot Jun 2, 2023 Full Review Showing Up (2022) 89% EDIT “A film that is far from a tract yet unmistakably holds artistic labor as dear as the fruits it produces.” – Reverse Shot Apr 13, 2023 Full Review Tori and Lokita (2022) 87% EDIT “[The Dardennes's] film still quakes with an incensed and undeniable power, personified in the forms of two spiritual siblings who represent each other’s only refuge.” – Reverse Shot Mar 24, 2023 Full Review Fremont (2023) 98% EDIT “There is an impressive mystique contained in the boxy frames of Fremont’s crisp, casually elegant black-and-white images, shot digitally by Laura Valladao.” – Reverse Shot Mar 15, 2023 Full Review All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) 95% EDIT “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed retains the impassioned clarity of Poitras’s style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life.” – Reverse Shot Oct 20, 2022 Full Review Riotsville, USA (2022) 91% EDIT “We are still living with and within the consequences of the ’60s, but, as this remarkable film reminds us, we are also living and reckoning with its manifold possibilities.” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review A House Made of Splinters (2022) 97% EDIT “What ultimately sets A House Made of Splinters apart is that its makers treat compassion not as something deserved or earned, but as a given in life and on screen.” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review Dos Estaciones (2022) 87% EDIT “The tensions in Dos estaciones roil beneath the calm, contemplative stillness of González’s prosaic visuals, with its penchant for unfussy long takes, and Sánchez’s tightly coiled and disciplined performance...” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review A Love Song (2022) 95% EDIT “Dickey’s internalized performance is a silent plea for connection, a warm hand stretching out to a fellow recluse, inviting him to grab on to it before time makes memories of them both.” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022) 85% EDIT “Encounter the banal images, wan color palettes, coming-of-age chestnuts, earnest monologues, budget-stretching needle-drops, half-hearted attempts at thematic import and amorphous montages that act like pressure-cookers of instant character development...” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review Nanny (2022) 91% EDIT “The drama that plays out between Aisha and her employers, her lover, and her faraway son evinces an emotional richness that is sustained at all points by Diop, delivering one of the most elegant and self-possessed breakout performances in recent memory.” – Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 Full Review Fire of Love (2022) 98% EDIT “A singular and sublime new documentary about the couple that risks the sentimental in order to realize the truly romantic.” – Reverse Shot Jul 7, 2022 Full Review Men (2022) 69% EDIT “Garland intends to shock us here, but he lacks the courage of his assumed convictions to effectively do so. In Men, he clears his throat to emit hot air.” – Reverse Shot May 26, 2022 Full Review Feathers (2021) 89% EDIT “Feathers is fueled by a quiet, quaking fury at a social imbalance predicated on inequity, exploitation, and rigid male chauvinism.” – Reverse Shot Mar 24, 2022 Full Review Great Freedom (2021) 97% EDIT “Great Freedom is distinguished less by the incidents it narrativizes than by the hypnotic pull of its craft.” – Reverse Shot Mar 5, 2022 Full Review 2nd Chance (2022) 91% EDIT “Bahrani, so acclaimed for being a filmmaker with an eye on injustice, fails to reckon with one of his more pressing themes, treating the daily, terroristic violence of the police state as an accepted and unquestioned fact of this particular American life.” – Little White Lies Jan 26, 2022 Full Review The Humans (2021) 92% EDIT “Whatever its overreaches and miscalculations, The Humans is an imperfect symbol of the type of attentive, clear-eyed, midrange American production that deserves a surer foothold within American movies.” – Reverse Shot Dec 3, 2021 Full Review Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) 99% EDIT “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy exquisitely showcases Hamaguchi's gift for homing in on moments of person-to-person contact and dilating its particular, hair-trigger tensions.” – Reverse Shot Oct 7, 2021 Full Review Bergman Island (2021) 84% EDIT “On the island of an artist who reflected and re-envisioned life as he knew it to be, Chris -- and Hansen-Løve -- find the courage to create, while accepting that there is no single narrative that can contain the whole of one's life.” – Reverse Shot Oct 1, 2021 Full Review
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