Curator Watchlist
Ari Aster’s pandemic-era western satire is ambitious, abrasive, and often sharply observed about paranoia, screens, and social breakdown, but it also seems designed to provoke as much as to illuminate. If you want a messy, divisive film that captures the psychic vertigo of 2020, it has real bite; if you want… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 28m
Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone
In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.
Ari Aster
Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone
Ari Aster’s pandemic-era western satire is ambitious, abrasive, and often sharply observed about paranoia, screens, and social breakdown, but it also seems designed to provoke as much as to illuminate. If you want a messy, divisive film that captures the psychic vertigo of 2020, it has real bite; if you want balance, clarity, or easy political catharsis, it may feel smug or exhausting.
Eddington aims to bottle the social panic of 2020 and shake it until it becomes a western, a farce, and a political autopsy all at once. The result is a movie that feels less interested in offering answers than in recreating the sensation of living inside a feedback loop of fear, outrage, and algorithmic noise. That can be bracing when it clicks, and alienating when it doesn’t.
What stands out most is the film’s commitment to modern American dread: masks, feeds, slogans, conspiracies, and the way every public gesture becomes instantly performative. The satire lands hardest when it treats the town like a pressure cooker where everyone is half-acting for an audience they can’t see. But the same impulse can make the film feel like a pileup of provocations, with its targets sometimes blurred by its own appetite for escalation.
For viewers who enjoy movies that are messy on purpose, Eddington is a potent, ugly mirror. For everyone else, it may register as a long, punishing argument with the present tense.
Griffin Newman · 13733 likes
★YOUR BEING MANIPULATED★
claira curtis (1★) · 10960 likes
Grossly irresponsible to make a film that attempts to examine the intensely vitriolic state of American politics amidst the earliest months of COVID and not mention how Trump, or the MAGA-sphere, directly amplified and exacerbated so many of those very issues. But at least we can laugh about the youths caring very loudly about George Floyd’s murder. And we can roll our eyes at the women who succumb to right-wing conspiracies as a coping mechanism to deal with trauma that
jonathan fujii (3★) · 10510 likes
Go back to 2020 for 2.5 hours challenge (level: hard)
davidehrlich (4★) · 8871 likes
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. Few other… more
Robert Daniels (1★) · 7091 likes
It used to be that every white male wanted to write the next great American novel and now it’s every white male filmmaker wants to make the next great “provocative” movie, and it’s tiring.
A stark American crime western where violence, fate, and moral exhaustion turn the landscape into a pressure chamber.
A darkly comic portrait of a man and a community spiraling into confusion, grievance, and cosmic unease.
For its ruthless American ambition, corrosive social energy, and apocalyptic sense of a country eating itself alive.
A savage comedy of incompetence, paranoia, and self-importance that keeps escalating into absurd disaster.
A blistering political satire about institutional chaos, bad faith, and the machinery of public outrage.
A foundational media satire about spectacle, manipulation, and the collapse of reality into performance.
A vicious ensemble comedy about panic, power, and opportunism under pressure.
The classic model for turning existential dread into savage, escalating political farce.
An early, eerily prescient look at media manipulation, populism, and the manufacture of public sentiment.
A conspiracy thriller that captures institutional mistrust and the sense that reality is being staged.
For its obsessive, procedural unease and the way it turns civic life into a fog of uncertainty.
A paranoid, screen-saturated mystery that treats modern life as a maze of codes, signals, and delusions.
pandemic paranoia, political polarization, small-town breakdown, online misinformation, social alienation, American decay, satire of public discourse, neighbor-against-neighbor conflict
dark satire, neo-western, political thriller, pandemic-era, social breakdown, media paranoia, black comedy, American anxiety, ensemble drama, bleak tone