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Its thesis is clear. We're all hypocrites. How the old generation has a stick up their ***, too rigid to embrace meaningful change, while the younger generation-damned from birth by social screens, performs outrage on Instagram in hopes of sleeping with Sarah.

Ari Aster skewers each political perspective, which in turn makes up a large majority of unhappy letterboxd reviewers, ironically complementing the film's punchline. No matter where you stand, it's naive to believe stupidity is exclusive to one side.

All in all, it's a film less concerned with who's right and more obsessed with how dumb it all looks from a distance.

It's a meticulously crafted powder keg, and Aster lights the fuse with the precision of someone who knows exactly how long the fuse burns. The man doesn't make movies-he engineers experiences. This one? A contemporary western that hums with unease, like a desert wind carrying whispers of something off.

Aster's got a reputation for unsettling audiences, but here he trades pagan rituals and family trauma for the sun-bleached nihilism of New Mexico. The tension isn't in the jump scares-it's in the silence between glances, the way a sheriff's badge catches the light just a little too sharply. His camera lingers like a vulture circling, and the editing? Tight. No wasted movement. You'll feel every minute of its 148 runtime, but not because it drags. Because it grinds.

Joaquin Phoenix as the sheriff? He's all coiled ambition and swallowed rage, a man who's mastered the art of smiling without it touching his eyes. Emma Stone? She's in her element here, shifting from warmth to withering skepticism like a switchblade flicking open. And Pedro Pascal-quiet, calculating, a performance that says more in a raised eyebrow than most do in monologues.

If you're expecting another Midsommar, adjust your sights. This is a different breed-a dark comedy dressed in cowboy boots, where the jokes land like gut punches. The humor's bone-dry, the violence matter-of-fact, and the existential dread? Oh, it's there. Lurking in the background like a bad habit you can't quit.

Is it perfect? No. The third act's ambition occasionally outpaces its grip, and not every metaphor sticks the landing. But perfection's overrated. Eddington's a ride-a nasty, hypnotic, memorable ride. Aster's not asking you to like it. He's daring you to look away.

My advice? Don't.

So, what does dark comedy mean, exactly ... ?

"Eddington," which falls under that genre on the Internet Movie Database, isn't the first movie that's left me asking the question. It's just the most recent.

The film is also labeled a Contemporary Western, a concept easier to grasp.

Eddington is the name of a tiny, out-of-the-way New Mexico town, grappling - as the rest of the country was when the story opens in 2020 - with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.

You can't get much more contemporary than that.

Written and directed by Ari Aster, who has developed a cult following for leading audiences into scary sometimes gross places, its cast is heavy with Oscar winners and nominees. Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Pablo Pascal, Dierdre O'Connell, Michael Ward and Austen Butler, for openers.

Phoenix plays Eddington's Sheriff Joe Cross, a sad-sack lawman who's got about as much as he can handle with his wife Louise (Stone) who doesn't love him ; her mother Dawn (O'Connell) whose favorite pastime is Googling conspiracy theories; and that Covid mask mandate that he's supposed to be enforcing.

Joe's got asthma, you see, which makes it hard for him to breathe whenever he tries to put the danged mask on.

Joe's not a political person, per se. The circumstances that lead him to run against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pascal) to become Eddington's mayor are more a matter of being pushed past his breaking point by one too many matters beyond his control.

There's the new AI data center that's been proposed for development that has local conservationists up in arms. There's the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis that's all over the news and has the town's teenage population rioting on Main Street. There's the loco crazy homeless guy, who always shows up to make matters worse. There are the rumors that the current mayor slept with Sheriff Joe's wife, before unceremoniously dumping her ... Aha, so maybe dark comedy is about trying to find the yuks in what Henry David Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation." That was the way Thoreau described "the mass of men" in his 1854 masterpiece "Walden." No one has summed things up better in the almost two centuries since.

Or maybe dark comedy is more a matter of dystopian satire, trying to whistle our way past the graveyard of civilization.

Whatever it's called, writer-director Aster clearly has a lot on his mind before he lets the action onscreen devolve into a hail of unholy gunfire, explosions and chaos in the third act.

Considering that they're both running for mayor, it's noteworthy what horrible communicators Sheriff Joe and incumbent Ted Garcia are. Joe has a habit of speaking his mind before his mind's made up. Ted is way better in TV commercials than in actuality. Both guys reveal the absence of anything like actual confidence every time they open their mouths.

The real powers in their world are behind the scenes, creating that water-sucking, resource-depleting high-tech data center, or infiltrating high-minded political demonstrations with false flag mercenaries Like an old-fashioned - as opposed to contemporary - Western, "Eddington's" setting is as much a character as the characters are. The saloon, church and wooden sidewalks may now be replaced with convenience marts, an historic Indian museum and a very convenient gun and ammo store, but there's still the sense of flimsy storefronts standing lonesome vigils a long way from the hills on the horizon on those windswept plains.

Likewise, Sheriff Joe's iPhone isn't in the credits, but it play a role as important as any character in the story. "Eddington" may be the first work of art made of misinformation. Social media is where that misinformation comes to life, festers and spreads like fungus. There's nothing like smart technology for making people stupid. Once you create artificial intelligence, actual intelligence is a flimsy defense indeed.

When it comes to polarized idiocy, filmmaker Aster doesn't take sides. The self-styled high-minded liberals are as gullible to online fictions as your standard garden-variety bigot. Some of the film's funniest scenes come when the teen demonstrators protesting the George Floyd killings tie themselves in moral knots trying to deny their own class and privilege. Aster's script suggests that actual pedophiles may far outnumber figments of conspiracy theory imagination - and may not be limited to one political party or another.

"Eddington" may be a work of genius. That's a saving grace, considering that none of its characters are particularly likable, it's disquieting to sit through, and its so-called humor hardly lightens the mood as you exit the theater into the actual dystopia waiting outside.

I can only tell this is gonna be a very polarising film, people are going to love the ambition from Aster or call it a convoluted mess.

Depending on your views during the 2020s will severely determined your outlook on this film. Are you able to laugh at the insanity or remain serious at the severity of events that transpired.

Eddington is ultimately a satire on the comedic ridiculousness and tumultuous times of the 2020's. Eddington in itself is the main character. It's a macrocosom of events that impacted the US but obviously ramps them up to 11.

I appreciate the craft and the film was at its best when it was reminiscent of the Coen's No Country For Old Men. The 2nd act elevated the implemented satire to a contemporary western crime thriller.

The film is hit or miss in its summary. I understand the message and themes but at some points the execution is lacking. I feel like it tried to juggle a lot of themes and messages. Maybe sticking to one or two would have made the film more tight and succinct.

Eddington feels like being locked in a room with your own thoughts...while those thoughts are armed and slightly unhinged. The pacing is tight, the plot twists keep you leaning forward, and just when your anxiety peaks, it throws in a gut-punch of humor that somehow makes it all feel human again.

It's a rare film that can make you laugh and feel like you need to sit quietly in a dark room afterward just to process what you watched. This is that film. Smart, offbeat, unsettling, and genuinely entertaining. Eddington doesn't just keep you intrigued, it lingers long after the credits roll.

When I first saw the trailer for Eddington, I knew right away this was not a movie I was eager to watch. Whoever cut that trailer should probably reconsider their career; it made the film look painfully dull. Unfortunately, the first half of the movie proved the trailer wasn't entirely misleading.

The story spends far too much time bogged down in political debates set during the pandemic era. These conversations are supposed to be thought-provoking, but most of them go in circles, leading nowhere. The dialogue feels both heavy-handed and oddly hollow, as if the writers wanted to capture the tension of the time but instead ended up rehashing tired talking points.

The one saving grace of the film is its impressive cast. A true ensemble of talent, they do their best to elevate the material, injecting nuance and gravitas where the script falls short. And yet, even they are not immune to the weight of the sluggish pacing; brilliant actors lost in a swamp of slow-moving scenes and clumsy political commentary.

Then, around the halfway mark, something shifts. The narrative finally sparks to life with an unexpected turn that injects suspense and gives the story much-needed momentum. For a while, it feels like Eddington has found its footing. There are moments of genuine intrigue and emotional impact, and you start to see glimpses of the great film it could have been.

But just as things get interesting, the movie stumbles again at the finish line. The ending is anticlimactic, not entirely out of place given the tone, but still unsatisfying and awkward. It leaves you with the feeling that the film simply didn't know how to wrap up its ideas, so it settled for an ending that is "understandable," yet underwhelming.

Final verdict: Eddington is a film of two halves; the first painfully slow and weighed down by misguided political chatter, the second finally engaging but ultimately leading to a disappointing conclusion. With a weaker cast this movie would have been a complete miss, but thanks to the performances and a few sparks of suspense, it manages to scrape by with a middling 6/10.

This movie reminds me of a real story of self awareness in light of the worlds ills. In the early 1900s, a newspaper reportedly asked a group of notable writers and thinkers to respond to the question, "What is wrong with the world today?" To which the famous theologian and thinker G. K. Chesterton is said to have replied with a characteristically witty and humble response "Dear Sirs, I am. Yours sincerely, G. K. Chesterton."

Ari Aster has made another horror film. This one is disguised as a modern day Western, Dark Comedy, but this is deep diving stuff that inserts us into a small New Mexico town in 2020 that is at the beginning stages of the COVID pandemic. Joaquin Phoenix is the tour guide - and the ride - who shows us something of what is wrong with the world.

Eddington took me back to feelings of despair that play on in our world. This is a most excellent tragic tale and definitely not a comedy, although the audience will probably laugh in the discomfort of seeing the true reflection of ourselves somewhere in this mirror of blame, conspiracy, narcissism, and social rage.

Somehow Aster keeps this from being preachy while giving us a scare at our own reflections. What wrong with Eddington? It's us.

In 2019, Ari Aster struck many film fans as the new face of horror and quickly attached him to the genre. In 2025, Ari Aster has departed from that stereotype and is now seen (at least in my opinion) as a director who makes very polarizing and ambitious films that he wants to make. I gotta respect the guy for going out and doing that. Eddington, much like his 2023 film "Beau is Afraid" is that kind of film. It's ridiculously ambitious, busy, and absolutely bonkers. It's something that I feel only Aster could make. I'll agree with the critics when they say Aster covers a lot of subjects but doesn't really commit to most of them. He seems to kind of get lost in the moment of trying to satirize and summarize too many subjects of the COVID pandemic to the point of exhaustion. It's not his most successful film and it's certainly not going to please everyone, but I greatly admire the drive he put into it.

Describing Eddington as a neo-western might be the most fitting way to summarise Ari Aster's 2025 dark comedy-drama-though even that hardly scratches the surface.

That said, I felt I needed a full ten minutes of silence after the credits rolled, just to process what I'd witnessed.

It's an Ari Aster film, after all, so if you're familiar with his work, you'll know to expect a whirlwind of emotional and thematic disarray. But Eddington isn't just messy-it's exquisite, unfiltered chaos.

If you've seen the trailer, don't be misled. It barely teases the disorienting spiral that unfolds. The story kicks off in May 2020, amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What begins as a snapshot of public hysteria-conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and the fear-soaked atmosphere-rapidly morphs into something darker and more disturbingly real.

We've spent the past five years collectively unmoored-adrift in chaos, where appearances deceive and identities dissolve. It sometimes feels like a failed social mutation-one born from freedom pushed to its breaking point-an evolutionary misstep we fought to achieve, only to have it turn against us.

Let's be clear: freedom is a vital human right. But when it becomes indistinguishable from anarchic self-destruction, something has clearly gone awry.

At its core, Eddington follows a standoff between small-town sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), set in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico.

Their clash is both personal and political-complicated by Garcia's fraught history with Cross's wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell).

Aster revisits his obsession with overbearing maternal figures, folding that tension seamlessly into the wider conflict as the two men find themselves on opposing sides of the mask debate.

The film is deliberately provocative, often hollow by design, and it's a difficult piece to review. You'll laugh, you'll wince, you'll question what you're watching-and you certainly won't find it comforting.

Aster touches on themes like racial division, though arguably without much new to say. The Black Lives Matter movement is clearly present in the film's DNA, but its representation feels muddled-more gestured at than fully explored.

Before it can fully engage with those ideas, the film veers off into another subplot filled with irrationality, violence, and distraction-perhaps intentionally mirroring how public attention shifted in real time.

What he does capture is the paranoia, anxiety, and social fragmentation that exploded when lockdowns began and the world collectively panicked. He blends it into a fever dream of confusion and satire, offering no answers-just raw sensation.

Much of the chaos is filtered through the lens of social media, which becomes the film's true stage. It's where the news is curated, where lies take root, and where misinformation thrives.

To emphasize this aspect, the film extensively employs the screenlife technique, blending traditional storytelling with found-footage and mockumentary styles. And let me tell you, it works remarkably well, enhancing the overall sense of realism.

Paranoia spreads like wildfire, jokes mutate into threats, and morality dissolves into a game of psychological warfare, disinformation, and mass manipulation.

Unsurprisingly, Eddington has sharply divided critics-and will likely do the same with audiences. Expect fiery debates. Some will praise its fearless ambition; others will dismiss it as bloated, incoherent, or pretentious. And honestly, that may be exactly what Aster intended.

As always, his visual storytelling is exceptional. Darius Khondji's cinematography (Uncut Gems, The Immigrant) balances the film's absurdity and dread with a sharp, immersive eye. Lucian Johnston's editing keeps the pacing surprisingly taut, especially for a film that thrives on disorientation.

Aster's visual language for violence remains as potent as ever. When revenge time comes, it hits with darkly funny moments-especially during 'The Antifa Massacre,' which delivers shocking laughs and gory satisfaction in true Ari Aster fashion.

But after all that-did I like it?

There's brilliance in Eddington-but perhaps brilliance trapped in a maze of its own ambition, leaving something essential just out of reach.

The ride remains undeniably compelling. Ari Aster remains one of the most fascinating directors working today.

But, as with Beau Is Afraid, he tests the limits of narrative and patience. There's brilliance in Eddington, but there's also a sense of something missing-maybe too much of everything, all at once.

This isn't a comfort film to watch. It won't leave you with a clear head. In fact, you'll probably leave the cinema clutching your skull, trying to piece together the fragments.

My advice? Watch it with a good friend-or a few-who appreciate psychologically demanding cinema.

Because once the screen fades to black, the real film begins-in your head, and in the conversations that follow.

Let's get this out of the way, my first mistake was forgetting what happened the last time Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix teamed up (Beau Is Afraid), and my second was thinking this would be a good movie to see on a date.

Eddington is a film that should work. The trailer promises a stylish neo-Western satire set against the surreal and emotionally charged backdrop of 2020's pandemic-era America. You've got a stacked cast, a topical setup, and the unique flavor of Ari Aster's direction. On paper, this thing had all the ingredients to be one of the year's best. But what we actually get is a film so self-indulgent, bloated, and exhausting, that by the time the movie gets to anything resembling what you saw in the trailer, two hours have passed-and it feels like you've aged an entire year.

The story is solid, buried somewhere under the relentless mountain of symbolism, surrealist detours, and exhausting monologues. Joaquin Phoenix, as always, acts his ass off. Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone deliver committed performances, and there are moments... brief moments... of biting satire and darkly funny commentary. But they're drowned under an avalanche of who gives a damn, just get to the damn point.

The pacing is brutal. Every time the film seems like it's found a natural stopping point-every time you brace yourself for the sweet release of credits-it starts again. And again. And again.

Eddington wants to be everything: a Western, a dark comedy, a political satire, a COVID-era meditation, a psychological thriller. The result is a disjointed, genre-hopping mess. By the end, the film doesn't leave you stunned or speechless-it leaves you drained, begging for it to just end already.

Eddington might work for die-hard Aster fans and film school debaters, but for the rest of us, it's a test of endurance-not entertainment, and after this, I'll be cutting my grass with scissors before I sit through another Ari Aster film.

20 years in the future. This movie will be one of the most efficient ways to experiment how a regular day in 2025 was.

It has everything that we have normalized since COVID. It touches all the important topics that somehow are not news anymore because we are drowning in information.

Once the AI bubble bursts, it also will be one of the first movies to tell us how dangerous some "tech gurus billionaires" are (or were).

Plus, this movie is a lesson on narrative pace.

This Movie is many things but not a good movie. Yes, that's how i will start my review. This movie has no specific genre, first it's a drama, then it became some dark comedy, then it's a crime thriller, then it's a effing war movie and at the last it's an unfinished revenge thriller. What the eff is this about! I don't know, i have no idea after watching this horrible thing.

The first two-thirds of this movie is a biting social commentary on the negative impact of social media in our lives. And as I was watching, I felt its brilliance. Unfortunately, Aster lost me in the last third. I'm not sure what he was going for with the gratuitous violence and full frontal nudity. The slow burn was working and then the film went off the rails into a fever dream that, for me, didn't serve the story. It's frustrating because I felt the film had a chance to move me like Taxi Driver did back in the 70's. But ultimately this one loses its balance and fails to stick the landing. No reflection needed.

Not a biopic of the late English actor Paul Eddington (although I think this would be more exciting and taken less time to tell!).

Ari Aster offers a laborious, talky and self important dark comedy /drama that has moments of funny comedy - the over the top hysteria of lockdowns and the breakdown of society that it can bring is a perfect springboard to set up a piece of work in any form.

Joaquin Phoenix continues to dazzle in his brave choices of roles and like Aster's previous film Beau Is Afraid is not afraid to add a pitiful depth, physical comedy and a vulnerability that marks him out in his generation of actors.

Emma Stone is given nothing to do.

Aster adds claustrophobia, breakdown in human behaviour (the excessive use of mobile phones documenting events ),is used in nightmarish qualities.

The pitfalls of conspiracy theories and the lonely (mainly American) victims is shown in all its rabid ,verbose hysteria.

At 149mins it's way too long for such a slim story,90mins would be better. I was bored after 45mins ,the story only kicks in in the last third after then most of the audience has checked out.

I give Aster plaudits in making original,thought provoking films that certainly test the audiences (if not patience).

He needs a judicious editor,and a word count dictator on his computer when writing the script.

Eddington is not a place worth visiting.

Eddington is the fourth film by Ari Aster, arriving on the heels of his disastrous Beau Is Afraid. Unfortunately, it repeats many of the same mistakes. While it is marginally better, mainly because, although the writing is still overstuffed and unfocused that tries to tackle too much, it at least avoids the surreal, scattershot indulgences that ruined Beau Is Afraid.

The core issue in this western is the writing, which is too incoherent and desperate to comment on too many issues at once. Few films can successfully balance that kind of ambition, and Eddington is not one of them. The film opens promisingly with a striking scene featuring a deranged man howling nonsense, ending with the reveal of Eddington, the city's name. But the momentum quickly dies. The story splinters into two disconnected halves, first a COVID-era commentary, then an abrupt descent into chaotic violence, which completely undermines any political point the film was trying to make. A film about the collective psychosis of COVID could have been a goldmine of unexplored ideas.

Civil War had a clearer perspective, and even though that film was criticized for saying little about the current political climate, it still presented at least one central theme, the importance and pitfalls of journalism. Eddington, by contrast, is a disjointed mess.

Emma Stone and Austin Butler are completely wasted. Their entire subplot could be excised without changing the story. Why burn money on A-lister side characters when your last film flopped so badly? Casting them would make sense if their roles were memorable, but instead, they're left with nothing to do.

It's also worth noting that both Eddington and Beau Is Afraid were produced by Aster himself, unlike his masterpiece Hereditary and the strong follow-up Midsommar. He should return to the tight, focused writing of those earlier works and concentrate on being a writer-director, instead of trying to do everything under the sun with each new project.

Eddington has the ingredients of a potentially great movie, but unfortunately, it underdelivers.

Possibly, one reason is that it meanders, as if the director forgot he's making a movie... and not a mini-series. All the main roles are miscast, and the characters don't seem to understand why they are there.

Forget about looking for 'powerful' performances. There are none. How could there be when someone like Joaquin Phoenix has to try and portray a mumbling asthmatic 'sheriff'?

The other big names don't do any better, and their performances are entirely forgettable. If this movie ever gets any kind of award, that would be laughable.

"The Solid Gold Magikarp". The algorithm doesn't just shape us - it defines what we even call "real."

Eddington grows on me like a slow virus.

At first I thought it was too cold, too restrained, and way too long. But the more I thought about it, the more it revealed itself as one of the most disturbingly precise mirrors of our time - a film not just about division, but born from it.

It begins as this quiet pandemic drama in a small New Mexico town, trying desperately to keep the chaos of the outside world at bay. But that isolation is an illusion. COVID isn't just a global event here - it's the metaphorical leak in the system, the first fracture through which the outside world and its endless digital noise start to seep in. What looks like calm is really containment. Every character stares into their phone, absorbing a million different truths, until the shared one collapses entirely. The town becomes a closed ecosystem ripped open by conflicting realities.

The film's brilliance lies in how Aster stages this breakdown of shared reality through moments that feel painfully small but eerily real. Like that bar scene: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and the homeless man outside. One sees a threat, the other sees empathy. Same event, two incompatible truths. It's not about morality anymore; it's about perception itself decaying.

Then there's Brian, maybe the sharpest character in the film - the embodiment of hyper-individualistic, politically opportunistic youth. He joins movements not for belief but for belonging. At first he sides with leftist activists for social and romantic validation; later he reinvents himself as a conservative influencer after tragedy. It's not hypocrisy - it's adaptation. In Eddington, ideology has become content, conviction, a commodity.

Ari Aster ties that all together with opening and closing the film with the data facility. The "Solid Gold Magikarp". "The movie is about a data center being built in New Mexico," Aster said at a Chicago Q&A. That's the key: it's not just a story about algorithmic chaos - it's a story emerging from it.

Compared to One Battle After Another, which is loud, declarative and emotional to the point of manipulation, Eddington whispers. And that whisper lingers longer. OBAO is entertaining and self-righteous, tailor-made for critics who already agree with it. Eddington is smaller, stranger, and harder to market but infinitely more alive.

Both are political, but Eddington examines what politics has become: not belief, not morality, but signal versus noise. Attack & defend.

____________ meta note: Both "Eddington" and "The Solid Gold Magikarp" are real AI anomalies - fragments of nonsense discovered in GPT-3 and GPT-4 datasets. Aster's choice of these names is intentional: the entire film plays like a digital hallucination, a once-self-contained town corrupted by infinite realities bleeding in.

8/10.

Director Ari Aster tackles the political and societal nightmare stemming from COVID, set in a fictitious town in New Mexico where a bleak landscape of despair and anxiety has taken over. This unwieldy and heavy-handed film is Aster's game attempt at portraying political rigidity on both sides of the fence and one man's slow unraveling even when his beliefs are sincere and ironclad. The biggest drawback is that Aster bites off more than he can chew. A tighter film would have picked its battles and left the rest for us to judge on our own.

A superior acting lineup bravely does its best with a cartoonish screenplay. Joaquin Phoenix gives it his all in a buffoonish role as the local sheriff who despises COVID restrictions and dogmatically stands up against their enforcement even when the townspeople are willing to comply. The problem is that Phoenix often has to carry the whole film himself. Emma Stone, Austin Butler and even Pedro Pascal are consigned to compelling, but smaller roles that barely dot the desert landscape.

Despite its punishing running time, the film is never boring. A more apt term would be "wearying" and it's not just because of the unpleasant memories of 2020 that are evoked. Simply put, it doesn't know when to quit and just when there's the possibility of a merciful, chastening conclusion, it has to be dragged along even further. Despite the bludgeoning that the film starts to inflict, especially towards the end, it does linger on as a compelling depiction of how lost the country is politically. What could have been a sobering and powerful morality tale ends up coming across as considerably less in the end, as if retreating back into caricature, just when it was about to say something serious.

In the end, Aster needs to learn how to edit himself and stop trying to do too much and understand that longer is not always better. If you're looking for his best craft, this simply isn't it. Not recommended, except to the most narrow audience that embraces irony and nihilism at the expense of all else.

Finally, a film addresses the giant elephant in the room that in the last five years has sent the country spiralling even further into political and identity tribalism, the ascendance of authoritarianism, etc., which the media likes to pretend it never stoked (as if Jan. 6th was all based on one discontented president's rhetoric and not also on thousands of jobs lost due to shutdowns): the Covid-19 Pandemic. The ever busy Pedro Pascal and always adventurous Joaquin Phoenix are great as Mayor and Sheriff at political odds in the tiny town of Eddington, New Mexico (really Truth or Consequences) with mask restrictions that drove many a citizen crazy in 2020-1 (the plot only seems a bit of an overreach by conflating AI into the mix, an issue that really didn't enter the national conversation until late 2022 at the earliest). Emma Stone is very funny as Joaquin's doll-obsessed, frigid wife, and the film has a charming, homespun quality that recalls other New Mexico-set films like "Welcome To Mooseport" and "White Sands" (I tried to be an extra when it filmed a year ago this past April but missed the window, finding only "Welcome Eddington!" marquees at various drive-ins). With NM's usually vibrant film scene slowed to a snail's pace due to tariffs and such (Superman was essentially fighting a fitter, younger Don), it's great we still have challenging, well-written films like this emerging in 2025 among all the usual play-it-safe remakes and reboots. Check out Eddington; at least it'll give you something to talk about.

I tried to watch Eddington but then at around the 1 hour mark I started watching my watch instead and realising there's STILL another hour and a half to go!!!

The tedium of the slooow burn build up using annoying boooringly written shallow trope characters was beyond comprehension..you could literally have made a twenty minute short with more impact and get your message across far more effectively.

Sorry gave up, couldn't be bothered to put the effort in (why should I if you didn't) and fell asleep.

Joaquin Phoenix is really one of our best actors. I am a fan of his work from films like "Inherent Vice", "Two Lovers", "Buffalo Soldiers", "Her", "Napoleon", "Irrational Man", "Gladiator", "Walk the Line", and "The Master". And of course he won the Oscar for best actor for "Joker".

Now he stars in a new movie called "Eddington" directed by Ari Aster. I know that Ari Aster previously directed the films "Hereditary", "Midsommer", and "Beau is Afraid". But I have not seen any of those.

The story takes place in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico during May of 2020, the time of the coronavirus pandemic. It starts with people arguing about whether or not they should have to wear face masks to protect them from the virus.

Joaquin plays the local sheriff who clashes with the mayor, played by Pedro Pascal in a supporting role. Then Joaquin's character decides to run for mayor himself.

The story escalates into some violence but is never less than compelling and entertaining. This is one of the better movies I have seen this year. Also with an excellent supporting cast including Emma Stone and Austin Butler.

Also with good cinematography from Darius Khondji, who was nominated for "Bardo false chronicle of a handful of truths" and "Evita".

This film is very much worth seeing in a movie theater. A very good movie.

My expectations almost made me quit after 20 minutes. This is NOT a comedy for the most part, so please don't expect one. You might chuckle here and there, but the first half of the movie is really tense and uncomfortable. Conflicts everywhere, all the time. It's also hard to find characters to root for. There are weak ones, morons, spoiled brats, conspiracists, people with severe anger issues... you name it, it's in it.

The payoff, though, which is the second half of the movie, is a very, very decent one. It's starts with kind of a twist, and kind of not - you'll probably guess the road the story will take, at least minutes before it first goes haywire, but for sure not how it all will go down.

Just don't expect a comedy or even something remotely feel-good.

It's a tale about the most dangerous humans there are: Weak ones.

...and then it also becomes something else. Maybe a bit to much, I think it would have worked better with a little less going on, in the finale.

But it's definitely worth the watch.

With interesting beginnings this VERY slowly devolves into a confusing mix of violence and attempt to make some statements on social media and our society. It misses the mark on all fronts and despite an excellent cast and some good cinematography the story line lack continuity and leaves huge gaps. Several characters are not fully explored or developed. Save your money!

The movie starts out strong with a social commentary surrounding the pandemic in a small New Mexico town.

Joaquin Phoenix and Deirdre O'Connell are excellent in it. You really buy into their characters immediately.

A little before the halfway mark, the movie takes an unexpected dark turn and then becomes disjointed.

Even with the convoluted nature of the storyline and overly sped-up pacing toward the end, I still found it entertaining and worth a watch.