{"id":562535,"date":"2026-07-27T22:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/562535\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:18:13","slug":"matt-damons-5-best-movies-according-to-rotten-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/562535\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Damon’s 5 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n \"Odysseus <\/p>\n

Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

This Matt Damon guy?\u00a0Turns out he’s a pretty good actor!\u00a0Actually, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, Damon \u2014 a Boston native who grew up with his future co-star and best friend Ben Affleck \u2014 is one of the most talented actors in Hollywood writ large, and it feels like we take him for granted a lot of the time. Despite being somehow underrated while also being one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Damon doesn’t get quite as much critical attention as contemporaries like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. In fact, even though Damon does have an Academy Award, it’s for\u00a0writing, not acting, and it feels pretty conspicuous that he hasn’t achieved that goalpost just yet.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s hard to rank Damon’s movies, because they’re all\u00a0really different. He’s great in a small role in Christopher Nolan’s cerebral space film “Interstellar,” adorably nebbish as pickpocket Linus Caldwell in the Ocean’s movies, outright frightening as the social-climbing Tom Ripley in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,”\u00a0ruthlessly lethal as action hero Jason Bourne in that eponymous franchise, and undeniably compelling in everything from “The Martian” to “Ford v. Ferrari” to “Oppenheimer.”<\/p>\n

So which movies are the best according to critics?\u00a0Here are the top five Damon movies ranked by Rotten Tomatoes. An important housekeeping note, though:\u00a0“Behind the Candelabra,” which features Damon as Scott Thorson \u2014 the longtime lover of Liberace (Michael Douglas) \u2014 is a television movie, not a feature film.<\/a> Due to that delineation, we’ve skipped over it in favor of Damon’s\u00a0sixth best film, but no shade towards Damon’s performance in “Behind the Candelabra” \u2014 it’s\u00a0great!<\/p>\n

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5. Oppenheimer<\/p>\n


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\n \"Leslie <\/p>\n

Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

Putting “Behind the Candelabra” aside for reasons that we already laid out, Matt Damon’s “fifth” best film according to Rotten Tomatoes is “Oppenheimer,” holding strong at a 93% average rating. This 2023 film, which won writer-director Christopher Nolan his first Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, stars Cillian Murphy as the famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man instrumental in creating the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. The cast of this film, to put it lightly, is sprawling and stacked \u2014 Robert Downey Jr. won his first acting Oscar for his role as Oppenheimer’s political rival Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Emily Blunt plays Oppenheimer’s troubled wife Kitty, and Kenneth Branagh portrays Danish physicist Niels Bohr, just to name a few \u2014 so who does Damon play?<\/p>\n

That would be General Leslie Groves, one of many real figures depicted in “Oppenheimer”<\/a> and an ally to the title physicist as they work on the bomb together. Leslie, in fact, is the no-nonsense military man who gets Oppenheimer involved with the Manhattan Project, for which Leslie serves as the director … and even though this strict general sometimes tires of Oppenheimer’s meandering, scientific way of speaking, the two work together well. Damon isn’t the focal point of “Oppenheimer” \u2014 that’s obviously Murphy, who also won an Oscar for his role \u2014 but he’s one of a ton of great actors in this massive historical epic.<\/p>\n

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4. Saving Private Ryan<\/p>\n


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\n \"Private <\/p>\n

DreamWorks\/Paramount<\/p>\n

The really funny thing about Steven Spielberg’s epic war film “Saving Private Ryan” being one of Matt Damon’s top five films on Rotten Tomatoes (at 94%) is that, despite playing the titular Private James Francis Ryan, Damon is\u00a0hardly in this movie. That’s because the entire plot revolves around a group of World War II soldiers in Normandy, led by Tom Hanks’ Captain John Miller, as they search for Damon’s Ryan, the sole missing member of a longstanding military family whose other sons have died serving their country against the Axis forces.<\/p>\n

Hanks is joined by a massive cast of famous faces including Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Vin Diesel, Bryan Cranston, Giovanni Ribisi, Nathan Fillion, and Paul Giamatti, just to name a few … and despite his minor role in the film, Damon shines whenever he’s on screen as the missing Private Ryan. Long considered one of the best and most realistic films about warfare and another investigation of the human condition and spirit by Spielberg, “Saving Private Ryan” might not actually be Damon’s movie, but it’s one of his five best according to critics \u2014 and it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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3. True Grit<\/p>\n


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\n \"LaBoeuf <\/p>\n

Paramount Pictures<\/p>\n

I have to confess something. I forgot Matt Damon was in “True Grit,”<\/a> a movie with a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This 2010 best picture nominee, co-directed by acclaimed brothers Joel and Ethan Coen \u2014 which is\u00a0not a remake of the 1969 film, but an adaptation of the 1968 book by Charles Portis \u2014 stars Jeff Bridges as the irasicble deputy United States marshal Rooster Cogburn, who’s recommended as the best of his cohort to help a young girl named Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, in the role that put her on the map). Mattie’s father was murdered by an outlaw named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and as it happens, Damon’s dedicated Texas ranger LaBoeuf is also looking for Chaney to finally bring him to justice.<\/p>\n

Damon’s character is on the right side of the conflict, but he’s also a\u00a0jerk; at one point he spanks Mattie for “insolence”\u00a0(at which point Rooster intervenes) and ditches the duo all together to go look for Chaney on his own, overconfident in his own tracking skills. Still, after a shoot-out that leaves LaBoeuf injured, he’s humbled quite a bit and makes nice with Mattie, giving the audience a small glimpse of that classic Damon charm. While he’s not one of the two main characters, Damon gives a reliably great performance in “True Grit,” and it’s hard to imagine anybody else playing this unexpectedly layered role.<\/p>\n

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2. The Odyssey<\/p>\n


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\n \"Odysseus <\/p>\n

Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

After seeing “The Odyssey,”\u00a0it occurred to me that we sometimes take Matt Damon for granted; he’s such a steadfast and solid actor that he doesn’t often get the credit he deserves (and the credit that’s given to contemporaries like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt). I sincerely hope that changes, because Damon is absolutely astonishing in Christopher Nolan’s daring, dark, and introspective adaptation of the ancient Greek poem attributed to Homer. The entire film rests on Damon’s broad, impressively sculpted shoulders \u2014 like another Greek figure, Atlas \u2014 and he carries it beautifully, selling Nolan’s second movie, after “Oppenheimer,” that centers on the hubris of man and the ruin of their creations.<\/p>\n

Damon is, of course, joined by a whole host of superstars; throughout the nearly three-hour run time of “The Odyssey,”\u00a0including Anne Hathaway as his long-lost wife Penelope, Tom Holland as their nearly-grown son Telemachus, John Leguizamo as his loyal swineheard Eumaeus, Benny Safdie as his former brother-in-arms Agamemnon, Himesh Patel as his lieutenant Eurymachus, and Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso, with whom Odysseus lives several forgetful years on an isolated beach. Damon sells\u00a0every single moment of his time on-screen as Odysseus, and between him and Nolan, they make one of the world’s oldest narrative stories \u2014 a story that, point in fact, is sort of the basis for every “hero’s journey” story that followed \u2014 feel somehow fresh and new, and the film is, as of this writing, sitting at a healthy 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.<\/p>\n

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1. Good Will Hunting<\/p>\n


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\n \"Will <\/p>\n

Miramax<\/p>\n

After all these years, with a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie that put Matt Damon on the map and won him his first-ever Academy Award is still regarded as his very best. Using a script he penned alongside Ben Affleck over the course of decades<\/a> and directed by Gus Van Sant, “Good Will Hunting” stars Damon as Will Hunting, who works as a janitor at the famed and prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology despite secretly being a mathematical genius himself. When he quietly solves a seriously difficult equation on a blackboard, a professor named Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd) notices and investigates Will’s past, learning that he works as a janitor as part of a parole program. Gerald, who recognizes that Will is brilliant, arranges for the young man to study math if he attends therapy; that’s where Robin Williams’ Dr. Sean Maguire comes in.<\/p>\n

“Good Will Hunting” won Damon and Affleck an Oscar for best original screenplay \u2014 and Williams also took home a statue for supporting actor \u2014 and it’s still the most beloved movie in Damon’s\u00a0oeuvre. Honestly, it might never be dethroned, which makes sense; not only is Damon fantastic in it, but it’s a testament to his overall talent.<\/p>\n


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