Matthew Eng

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Oct 21, 2024 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... Go to Full Review Hard Truths (2024) 95% - -

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Aug 13, 2024 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. Go to Full Review Good One (2024) 98% - -

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jan 26, 2024 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. Go to Full Review Tótem (2023) 97% - -

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Oct 13, 2023 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. Go to Full Review Last Summer (2023) 86% - -

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Oct 6, 2023 [A] cumbersome film, whose feints at fun and friskiness are unnervingly forced. Go to Full Review Foe (2023) 25% 56%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Aug 4, 2023 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. Go to Full Review Passages (2023) 94% 72%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jun 2, 2023 Past Lives [is] the calm, clear-eyed filmmaking debut of the New York-based, Korean-American playwright Celine Song. Go to Full Review Past Lives (2023) 95% 86%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Apr 13, 2023 A film that is far from a tract yet unmistakably holds artistic labor as dear as the fruits it produces. Go to Full Review Showing Up (2022) 89% 49%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Mar 24, 2023 [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. Go to Full Review Tori and Lokita (2022) 87% 72%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Mar 15, 2023 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. Go to Full Review Fremont (2023) 98% 87%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Oct 20, 2022 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. Go to Full Review All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) 95% 62%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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. Go to Full Review Riotsville, USA (2022) 91% 56%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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. Go to Full Review A House Made of Splinters (2022) 97% 83%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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... Go to Full Review Dos Estaciones (2022) 87% - -

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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. Go to Full Review A Love Song (2022) 95% 68%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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... Go to Full Review Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022) 85% 61%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 27, 2022 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. Go to Full Review Nanny (2022) 90% 69%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Jul 7, 2022 A singular and sublime new documentary about the couple that risks the sentimental in order to realize the truly romantic. Go to Full Review Fire of Love (2022) 98% 84%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot May 26, 2022 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. Go to Full Review Men (2022) 69% 40%

Matthew Eng Reverse Shot Mar 24, 2022 Feathers is fueled by a quiet, quaking fury at a social imbalance predicated on inequity, exploitation, and rigid male chauvinism. Go to Full Review Feathers (2021) 89% - -