Eddington

Wow. A lot to process and unpack. _Eddington_ received rapturous applause and huge moments of laughter at Sydney Film Festival. It’s chaotic, freewheeling and incredibly funny. Yes - it is Aster’s best film.

Aster has made an unhinged social satire on the culture wars - the division, virtue signalling and general disingenuousness. And he does so with sub-machine gun precision, much like the one that appears in the final act. Aster’s is a scattershot approach, rife with motif and self-aware savagery. No one is safe - right-wingers get both barrels, but the resulting shrapnel hits a lot...

Some would say – and quite astutely at that – there’s plenty of madness to go around these days, and they’d be right. But where and when did this begin? A good place to start looking would be the COVID-19 Pandemic, a time when fear was ratcheted up, conspiracy theories ran amok, “protective” measures slid into excessive overreach, neighbors routinely spied on (and often made unsupported accusations about) neighbors, and people’s imaginations were let loose without restraint. What began as an alleged but widely legitimized public health crisis soon spilled over into myriad other a...

FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://movieswetextedabout.com/eddington-movie-review-from-covid-satire-to-blood-soaked-western-noir/

"Eddington is an intense portrait of pandemic-era life and its social repercussions, exploring themes of leadership, polarization, and community collapse, anchored by a standout Joaquin Phoenix performance as a man slowly unraveling.

Ari Aster takes risks by fusing genres and radically shifting from sociopolitical satire to violent, chaotic thriller midway through - a choice that both energizes and fragments the story.

Even so, the combination of formal amb...

Whilst Joaquin Phoenix delivers one of his usually characterful efforts here, the rest of this film is a fairly muddled attempt at a western with a fairly weak underpinning story. He’s the bronchially-challenged sheriff “Cross” who is at odds with the town’s mayor “Ted” (the rapidly becoming ubiquitous in 2025 Pedro Pascal) in a small New Mexican town. It’s election time, and the latter man is standing for another term when an incident in their town that is rapidly becoming under-policed encourages “Cross” to stand for office, too. Over the next couple of hours, we discover j...