‘Eddington' reviews: Ari Aster's ‘brazenly provocative' COVID-era Western earns strong praise from critics

Yahoo

16-05-2025

Ari Aster's star-studded new film Eddington has found fans among some of the industry's top critics following its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
'The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster's Eddington is also the first major Hollywood movie that's been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams,' wrote David Ehrlich in his review for Indiewire. 'Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a No Country for Old Men riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who's exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there's a good chance those are your neuroses, too.'
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Set in May 2020, Aster's new film is focused on a conservative small-town New Mexico sheriff (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who ends up running for mayor against the town's liberal opponent, a tech entrepreneur played by Pedro Pascal. Rather than run away from such hot-button issues as the coronavirus pandemic and its health safety mandates, the outrage over Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, and performative activism, to name but a few culture war issues, Aster uses his movie to interrogate those polarizing subjects.
'That he kicks off his film by skewering COVID protocols, only to lampoon the radical-chic fervor of middle-class white kids, may make you wonder, for a moment, if Ari Aster has turned into some right-wing hipster auteur tossing cherry bombs attached to Fox News talking points,' wrote Variety critic Owen Gleiberman in his review, which ran with a headline that called Eddington 'brazenly provocative.'
'Actually, it's not nearly that simple,' he continued. 'In Eddington, Aster is dead serious about dramatizing what he views as the looking glass that America passed through during the pandemic era. He's targeting that moment as The Great Crack-Up, the moment when the country lost its collective mind. But in the film there are many components to that, drawn from a wide cultural-ideological spectrum. The movie does show sympathy for the increasingly mainstream view that the sense of control that dominated the COVID years went too far. That Eddington, while larger than a small town — it's a place of sprawling streets and buildings — appears to be all but abandoned is something that casts its own eerie spell; it stands in for a nation that's been hollowed out, depleted, robbed of its hope for the future. When a teenage boy is chewed out by his father for having joined in a 'gathering' (i.e., he met up with half a dozen of his friends in the park), we feel the creeping unreality of it.'
Co-starring Emma Stone and Austin Butler, A24 will release Eddington in theaters this summer on July 18. Read on for more reviews and social media reactions (some of which were negative).
Emma Kiely, Collider: 'Phoenix is the perfect actor to play a man as stupid as he is dangerous, bumbling around like a man who's just been transported from the 1920s, but is still capable of mass destruction. If you're coming for any of the other stars, you'll be left disappointed. In the film's tamest role, Pascal is an effective and calming antidote to Phoenix's hysteria, exposing his range beyond the reluctant father, but he's never given the ground to do anything majorly different. Stone and Butler are particularly underserved, as the way in which their characters connect is one of the script's most compelling side quests, but it's never fully delved into.'
Tim Grierson, Screen Daily: 'Ari Aster's fourth feature seeks nothing less than to deliver a definitive snapshot of what America felt like during the height of the 2020 global pandemic. Eddington is a mad vision targeting the myriad ills still plaguing the nation — an addiction to guns, an unhealthy fixation on consipracy theories, a poisonous inability to distinguish between truth and fake news — but the writer/director turns those inspirations into a wan, hyperbolic narrative that offers little insights into the very real problems it identifies.'
Nicholas Barber, BBC: 'Just when you're being drawn into the murder plot, Eddington takes another turn. Its low-level strangeness jumps to surreal and gory heights – and it keeps going higher until it hits a peak of gonzo high-adrenaline fun that leaves you reeling and breathless. Many viewers will have had enough of the film long before then, but there is something heroic about Aster's uncompromising determination to go his own way. It's amazing, too, that he has got away with such an unhinged project so soon after Beau is Afraid. The overstuffed nature of Eddington suggests that the US's conflicts in the 21st Century were ultimately too much for him to process. But you have to hand it to him for trying.'
Kevin Maher, The Times U.K.: 'We've had The Bubble, Locked Down, Dumb Money and a handful of other movies made during or just after the pandemic that attempted to address, however tangentially, the psychological impact of Covid. This time, from the prestige director Ari Aster (Midsommar) and an A-list cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone, we have a huge, self-conscious 'state of the nation' satire. It's an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it's quite the mess.'
Sofia Monks Kaufman, The Independent: 'This is Aster's funniest film to date, and makes use of an ever-expanding and shifting cast to dot the 150-minute runtime with well-observed comic details and visual payoffs. These often riff on the deadpan reactions of the Black and Native American characters to Joe and his meathead deputy. Aster's enduring preoccupation with the paranoid universes we build in our minds takes on a less sympathetic, more malign aspect when this self-absorption wears a law enforcement badge and carries a rifle.'
Ben Croll, The Wrap: 'Eddington roars to life as the bodies pile up, and once the filmmaker begins riffing on deeper pathologies that long predate the recent past. That a crime site falls on the precise dividing line between state and Native American jurisdictions reframes that idea of concurrent Americas in an interesting and organic way without getting too mired in cerebral acrobatics. This is the part of the film with a bazooka, after all.'
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