movie reviews of eo

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
• Problemista Link to Problemista
• Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

• Mary & George: Season 1
• Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
• Sugar: Season 1
• American Horror Story: Season 12
• Parish: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Loot: Season 2
• Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
• The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• Palm Royale: Season 1
• Manhunt: Season 1
• The Regime: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• We Were the Lucky Ones Link to We Were the Lucky Ones
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Pedro Pascal Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer

Dwayne Johnson Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

TV Premiere Dates 2024

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

• Trending on RT
• 3 Body Problem
• Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
• Play Movie Trivia

2022, Drama, 1h 28m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Bravely updating Bresson with brilliant results, EO is a donkey-driven drama that'll stubbornly stick with you long after the credits roll. Read critic reviews

You might also like

Where to watch eo.

Watch EO with a subscription on Max, rent on Apple TV, Vudu, Prime Video, or buy on Apple TV, Vudu, Prime Video.

Rate And Review

Super Reviewer

Rate this movie

Oof, that was Rotten.

Meh, it passed the time.

It’s good – I’d recommend it.

So Fresh: Absolute Must See!

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Step 2 of 2

How did you buy your ticket?

Let's get your review verified..

AMCTheatres.com or AMC App New

Cinemark Coming Soon

We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future.

Regal Coming Soon

Theater box office or somewhere else

By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie.

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Eo   photos.

The world is a mysterious place when seen through the eyes of an animal. EO, a grey donkey with melancholic eyes, meets good and bad people on his life's path, experiences joy and pain, endures the wheel of fortune randomly turn his luck into disaster and his despair into unexpected bliss. But not even for a moment does he lose his innocence.

Genre: Drama

Original Language: Polish

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Producer: Ewa Piaskowska , Jerzy Skolimowski , Eileen Tasca

Writer: Ewa Piaskowska , Jerzy Skolimowski

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 18, 2022  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Feb 21, 2023

Box Office (Gross USA): $1.1M

Runtime: 1h 28m

Distributor: Janus Films

Production Co: Haka Films , Skopia Film, Moderator Inwestycje, Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Alien Films

Cast & Crew

Sandra Drzymalska

Isabelle Huppert

The Countess

Lorenzo Zurzolo

Mateusz Kosciukiewicz

Tomasz Organek

Lolita Chammah

Agata Sasinowska

Anna Rokita

Mateusz Kościukiewicz

Jerzy Skolimowski

Ewa Piaskowska

Screenwriter

Jeremy Thomas

Executive Producer

Michał Dymek

Cinematographer

Agnieszka Glińska

Film Editing

Pawel Mykietyn

Original Music

Miroslaw Koncewicz

Production Design

Robert Dyrcz

Set Decoration

Kamila Grzybowska-Sosnowska

Katarzyna Lewinska

Costume Design

Jorgelina Depetris Pochintesta

Paulina Krajnik

Eileen Tasca

News & Interviews for EO

Awards Leaderboard: Top Movies of 2022

Oscar Winners 2023: Full List of the 95th Academy Awards Winners

Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett Take Top Prizes at 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Awards

Critic Reviews for EO

Audience reviews for eo.

There are no featured audience reviews for EO at this time.

Movie & TV guides

Play Daily Tomato Movie Trivia

Discover What to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes Podcasts

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

This brash film about a wandering donkey may just leave you in tears.

John Powers

The donkey's eyes seem to take the measure of modern life in Jerzy Skolimowski's film, EO . Festival de Cannes hide caption

The donkey's eyes seem to take the measure of modern life in Jerzy Skolimowski's film, EO .

We all have things we don't like in movies. For some it's horror, for others bloodshed, for still others, nudity and sex. For my part, I've always found it excruciating to watch a film in which animals are shown being abused.

I was filled with dread at the prospect of seeing the new film EO , which is a riff on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar , a painful masterpiece in which a donkey is ground to dust by the world's inhumanity. But I knew I had to see it because it was made by one of my cinematic heroes, the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who at age 84 is enjoying an astonishing late career resurgence. So I dragged myself off to a screening. And I'm glad I did. Far from being a cavalcade of misery, EO is a thrillingly imaginative piece of filmmaking: a strange, haunting epic about a donkey that couldn't feel more of our moment.

The donkey's name is EO, and as the action begins, EO is part of a small circus act with a loving young woman trainer. But when the circus goes broke, EO is sold off to farmers. They don't treat EO badly but the donkey remembers a happier, earlier life and soon escapes, beginning a journey across modern Europe that carries EO from forests and towns, to villas and scrap heaps the size of small Alps.

Now, normally a film like this would focus on the mean people who surround EO's wanderings. But the people here aren't all bad. Along the way, EO encounters all manner of human beings from the kind to the heartlessly brutal. Yet in a bold move, Skolimowski doesn't give precedence to the human side of things. He stays centered on his donkey hero, giving EO's existence an independence and worth equal to any of the humans we meet. We come to know the world from EO's point of view — the film's alien beauty suggests an animal's perceptions — and we share the donkey's emotions.

Skolimowski constantly shows us EO's dark eyes, which seem to take the measure of modern life. What they're witnessing and judging is our world with its rampant despoiling of nature, and in particular, its treatment of animals — from the looming wind turbines that slaughter birds in flight, to hunters with laser-guided rifles gunning down wolves, to the industrial food system that endlessly drives animals into the meatpacking plant. We spend the film fearing what may befall EO.

Now, a sense of the cosmos being out to get you has been present in Skolimowski's work since the beginning. Not surprisingly, perhaps, as his father was executed by the Nazis and he himself grew up in the repressiveness of Communist Poland. A man of many gifts — he's also been a boxer, a poet, a painter and an actor, even in Marvel Movies! — Skolimowski enjoyed a terrific run from the 1960s to the 1980s, making great movies like Barrier , Deep End and Moonlighting . Then in his mid-40s, he seemed to go cinematically fallow. What nobody could have guessed was that, in his eighth decade, he'd catch fire again, turning out films like Essential Killing and 11 Minutes that crackle with Young Punk audacity.

This panache is on display everywhere in EO , with its onrushing camera, color filters, aggressive music and utter confidence about throwing viewers into the donkey world where there's more poetry than plot and nobody explains what's going on. The film is so brash, freewheeling and inventive that, if I didn't know Skolimowski had made it, I'd have assumed it was the work of a brilliant 25 year old discovering what they — and the movies — can do.

Part of what makes EO feel so alive is that it speaks to today's huge, ongoing shift in consciousness about animals and our increasing awareness that we treat them horribly. This is a film filled with compassion for the exploited, ill-treated creatures of this world and electric with anger at those who, through malice or thoughtlessness, perpetuate cruelty toward the powerless.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that Bresson's donkey film gave you "the world in an hour and a half." You can say the same of Skolimowski's revamped version, which may be another way of telling you that this is a movie that may leave you in tears.

Review: ‘EO,’ a gorgeous portrait of a donkey, is the movie you’ve been braying for

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

In one of the most astonishing sequences in “EO,” a rapturous hymn to the natural world from the 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, a wandering donkey gets lost in a forest primeval. Night has fallen, but pools of moonlight illuminate this hushed, dark world in all its living glory. A little frog skims along the surface of a rushing stream. A skittering spider spins its web. An owl frowns down at the donkey from its treetop perch, as though registering an intruder’s presence. There are also a couple of howling wolves, a wary red fox and, in time, an array of green laser beams announcing the presence of nearby hunters, whose gunshots shatter the serenity of this woodland idyll.

The entire sequence tells much of the movie’s story in miniature. Again and again this donkey, known as EO (an approximation of the sound he makes), will experience a moment of freedom, only for a few human beings to come along and drag him back into harm’s way. If that risks making “EO” sound like a compendium of cruelty, rest assured that it isn’t, though it may speak to Skolimowski’s decades-long affinity for underdogs in movies like “Le Départ” (1967) and “Essential Killing” (2010). He knows that humans can be kind, but also that they can be abusive, with their often callous indifference to the rights and welfare of other creatures. The beauty that Skolimowski and the cinematographer Michal Dymek show us in “EO” — and shot for shot, this could be the year’s most breathtakingly beautiful movie — isn’t a denial of that cruelty, but a response to it.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

It begins with a screen-flooding burst of red light and a thunderous passage from Pawel Mykietyn’s orchestral score, which pulses and surges hypnotically throughout. In this early moment, EO is part of a circus act with a young performer, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), who coos to him, caresses his coat and gives him carrot muffins to eat. Kasandra becomes the love of his life, the human he dreams about and longs for after they’re separated and he is shipped off to his next home. But that’s as far as Skolimowski goes in imputing motives or desires to EO, apart from the basic compulsions to eat, rest and roam. As the director seems to signal with regular closeups of EO’s enormous eyes — they’re somehow both inscrutable and soulfully expressive — there are limits to how much we can enter into, or even imagine, a donkey’s inner life.

Others, however, are happy to speak on his behalf: “Can’t you see this animal suffers?” an activist yells during a protest that will cause the circus to disband and send EO and his fellow four-legged performers running in all directions. The rest of this swift and relentless 86-minute movie (which Skolimowski scripted with his wife, Ewa Piaskowska) follows the donkey on a zig-zagging trek across Poland to Italy, over rolling hills and man-made bridges, through tunnels and past wind turbines and into that enchanted forest. At one point, in a shot so serendipitous it feels almost supernatural, a herd of galloping horses materializes alongside EO’s transport vehicle, their exhilarating freedom throwing his confinement into painful relief.

Along the way there are brief stops at a newly opened barn, where EO is sweetly nuzzled (but also frightened) by majestic horses, and a raucous sporting event where he becomes a grievously abused mascot for the winning team. From there he’s brought to a large facility where, by some whim of human mercy, he’s nursed back to health rather than put down. (Some of his neighbors aren’t so lucky.) From there he will ride along with a couple of drifters and eventually make his way to an Italian villa, where a countess played by none other than Isabelle Huppert breaks a few dishes and glares seductively at a hunky priest (Lorenzo Zurzolo). Huppert also becomes, I think, a kind of emblem of the larger European art-house cinema in whose domineering shadow this brilliant movie and its lowly, animalist (as opposed to lofty, humanist) concerns take root.

Which is not to suggest that “EO,” which shared the third-place jury prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has gone unnoticed or unrecognized, though it could easily get lost at the few American theaters where it will be shown, as it should be, on the big screen. When I first saw “EO” at Cannes, it was spoken of, sometimes dismissively, as more or less a contemporary remake of “Au Hasard Balthazar,” Robert Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece about the life, death and extraordinary beauty of a donkey much like this one. Both Balthazar and EO love and are loved by a human, and both are forced to become beasts of burden. Both also bear deadpan witness to all manner of human awfulness and absurdity.

Skolimowski, for his part, has acknowledged “Au Hasard Balthazar” as both an inspiration and a point of departure. While both films share a clear empathy for their protagonists, their visual and rhythmic differences are no less obvious. Bresson’s stately black-and-white compositions and gently flowing dissolves are a far cry from Agnieszka Glinska’s jagged edits and Dymek’s sweeping, vibrant-hued camerawork, especially those angry shocks of red. (The boldness of the imagery speaks to Skolimowski’s background as a painter.) And while Bresson folded an intricate human drama into the background of “Balthazar,” the humans in “EO” are interesting but comparatively interstitial figures. Their problems and sufferings — one weeps, another dies — concern us only to the degree that they impact EO.

EO himself is played by six donkeys — their names are Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — who are fused, through seamless shooting and editing, into a character we come to know and love. The intimacy of the camerawork — the loving close-quarters attention it showers on EO with his sometimes downcast, sometimes excited gaze, his perked-up ears, his soft gray fur and the scrumptious string of carrots that at one point adorns his neck — itself feels like an expression of that love. Skolimowski isn’t really trying to convey EO’s perspective, aside from a few shots that suggest a donkey’s-eye view, with their low-to-the-ground angles and blurred edges. He seems more interested in capturing a sense of what it means to be in EO’s presence, bringing you close enough that you feel you could talk to him, breathe in his scent and run your fingers through his fur.

In “EO,” the camera doesn’t just follow the story or record the action. Its restless, exploratory movements express a kind of shared consciousness, a spirit of communion among different members of the animal world, whether they’re running together in a field or sharing the same tight enclosure. It’s the grace of this movie to extend that communion to the human beings who pass in front of the camera, and whose fates are tightly bound up with EO’s, whether they realize it or not. And finally, that communion is extended to the audience, and especially to those of us who go to the movies to be jolted, moved and have our sense of the universe shaken up or gently realigned. The world we share with EO is cold and cruel, which doesn’t mean we have to be.

In Polish and Italian with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 2 at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, downtown Los Angeles

More to Read

Review: A sun-dappled Italian fable, ‘La Chimera’ feels like the discovery of a new language

March 29, 2024

Review: Vicious ‘Dogman’ shows a director known for excess at his most unmuzzled

Review: It’s a ruff road to redemption in ‘Arthur the King,’ a well-trained tail of bonding

March 15, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Joe Flaherty will always remain dear to comedy fans, thanks to ‘SCTV’ and ‘Freaks and Geeks’

April 2, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

Michael Stuhlbarg returns to Broadway after man allegedly hurled a rock at his head

Andrew Scott and Dakota Fanning say their ‘Ripley’ characters aren’t rivals, ‘they’re frenemies’

Barbara Rush, ‘It Came From Outer Space’ and ‘Peyton Place’ actor, dies at 97

April 1, 2024