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The Hindu
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Eddington' trailer: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal face off in Ari Aster's COVID-era western
A24 has released the first full trailer for Eddington, the latest film from director Ari Aster, featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in leading roles. Set during the summer of 2020, the film explores political and social tensions in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd. Phoenix stars as Sheriff Joe Cross, a local law enforcement officer who challenges incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia, played by Pascal, in a contentious mayoral race. The trailer presents a sharp divide between the two characters as the town becomes a microcosm of the broader unrest unfolding across the United States at the time. Images of social distancing, protests, and conspiracy theories appear alongside scenes of escalating violence and political division. According to the trailer, the story centers on the growing conflict between Cross and Garcia and how it threatens to destabilise the town's 2,345 residents. The cast also includes Austin Butler, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr., and William Belleau. Eddington is Aster's fourth feature following Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and Beau Is Afraid (2023). Unlike his earlier work in horror, this film marks a shift into political drama with Western influences. The film premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in the main competition section. Initial reactions were mixed, with some critics praising its ambition. At a press conference during Cannes, Pascal addressed questions about the film's political content. 'Fear is the way that they win,' he said. 'Keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are. … F**k the people that try to make you scared, you know? And fight back.' Eddington is scheduled for theatrical release on July 18.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ari Aster's ‘Eddington' Sharply Divides Cannes: Star Pedro Pascal Defends a Western About ‘Our Worst Fears' Amid Lockdown
When writer/director Ari Aster stood up for the ovation after the Cannes premiere of his divisive 2020-set Western 'Eddington' (July 16, A24), he said, 'I feel very privileged to be here. This is a dream come true. Thank you so much for having me. And, I don't know, sorry?' Indeed, festival attendees have been fiercely divided by his 145-minute portrait of a fictional New Mexico town wracked by COVID, BLM, ACAB, you-name-it-2020-buzz-concept during the darkest season of American lives in recent memory. Joaquin Phoenix (Aster's 'Beau Is Afraid') plays a conservative sheriff who decides to run against his Gavin Newsom-esque, pro-masks-and-testing adversary, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), in the local mayoral election. More from IndieWire The Cannes 2025 Films So Far Most Likely to End Up in the Oscar Race 'Imago' Review: Chechen Documentary Explores a Filmmaker's Conflicted Return to His Roots Meanwhile, at home, Phoenix's character Joe Cross is in a quarantine bubble with his hysteria-addled wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her far-right conspiracy-obsessed mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), the type for whom hydroxychloroquine was presumably a panacea. But Joe's campaign is all anti-masks, anti-vax, with the threat of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) also posing a challenge to his political and personal life. The film has sparked massive debates up and down the Croisette since premiering Friday night, with the starriest red carpet thus far and a press conference Saturday afternoon featuring Aster with his actors Phoenix, Pascal (in a sleeveless top), Stone (in a pixie haircut, her hair growing back presumably after shaving it off for Yorgos Lanthimos' upcoming 'Bugonia'), and Michael Ward, who plays Phoenix's next-in-command. IndieWire has talked to people who loved or hated the film, with rarely any opinion in between and certainly never without a strong response of some kind from anyone — whether out of boredom or raptures over Aster's in-your-face replay of our worst COVID-times memories. 'Eddington' could be a tough sell for audiences unwilling to be submersed again in summer 2020 and all the chaos and anxieties it erupted. Other pundits I've spoken to defend 'Eddington' as a necessary social satire that mocks and derides the panic of that year, while encapsulating it all into one movie as never before. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote in his rave review that 'few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required' to pull this movie off, 'and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried.' 'It's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this,' Pascal said at the press conference. 'It's far too intimidating a question for me to address. I'm not informed enough. I want people to be safe and protective. I want very much to be on the right side of history.' 'Eddington' indeed takes shots at both sides of the aisle, roasting liberal posturing in the form of social justice youth like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), who posts TikToks about James Baldwin and rants about having any position at all on 'stolen land.' Phoenix's sheriff character, meanwhile, could only be wrought from the era of Trump, as he rails against mask mandates and is suspicious of the George Floyd-inspired protests shaking up his community. At one point, he swaggers into a grocery store with the pompousness of Western's most classic, gun-on-the-hip cowboys. Pascal added, 'I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. This was building toward an untethered sense of reality. There is a point of not going back. I was overwhelmed by that fear, and it's wonderful that it was confirmed by Ari.' Aster, whose latest feature is a hairpin departure from the genre thrills and chills of films like 'Hereditary' and 'Midsommar' and is far from the spirit of intrusive-thought-induced weirdness of 'Beau Is Afraid,' added, 'I wrote this movie in a state of fear and anxiety. I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.' 'Eddington' is his first feature to premiere at Cannes. 'I feel like we're on a dangerous road, and we're living in an experiment that hasn't gone well,' Aster said (via Deadline) about his MAGA- and liberal-skewering Western. 'I feel there is no way out of it… Mass liberal democracies always had this fundamental agreement we agree what we're arguing about, that system was coming from power. So it's not like suddenly there's this bad power out there. It's always been there, but right now it's chaos.' Stone, who connected with Aster amid his 2024 'Beau Is Afraid,' said that her research into the conspiracy theories that turn her character against her husband even ended up modifying her personal social media algorithms (via Variety). 'The only additional thing that scared me a little bit in the algorithm system was looking into some of the things that are in this film that haven't been in my algorithm, unfortunately, added them to my algorithm,' she said. 'Because once you start Googling it, you start seeing more and more things. So it's a real rabbit hole, very quickly. Unfortunately, I'm still getting fed some crazy shit.' 'Eddington' is still the most conversation-starting Competition premiere at Cannes, with critics split over its social message and pacing (it's currently at 63 on Metacritic, where you can find reviews all over the map). How A24 will market this movie — only one teaser has been released so far, showing Phoenix doom-scrolling through familiar images of the deepest COVID era — is an intriguing question in the lead-up to its July theatrical release. Alex Garland's 'Civil War,' another post-COVID story of national conflict, did well for A24 last year, grossing more than $127 million by tapping into a fascination factor over a divided United States. Who will 'Eddington' appeal to? Either way, it's pitting Cannes audiences against each other — Screen Daily called it a 'wan satire,' while Variety deemed it 'brazenly provocative' — and will no doubt continue to stoke debate into the summer. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
CairoScene
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Review: Eddington, The Unmasking That Reveals Nothing New
Review: Eddington, The Unmasking That Reveals Nothing New I was genuinely looking forward to Ari Aster's Eddington, but it didn't live up to my expectations. After Hereditary, Midsommar, and the ambitious yet ultimately disappointing Beau Is Afraid, Aster reunites with Joaquin Phoenix for what might be his least compelling project to date. While Eddington is watchable and never exactly dull, it lacks the depth and sharpness of his earlier work. The film is a satire set in a fictional small town in New Mexico. It pokes fun at how people behaved during the COVID lockdown. The divide over wearing masks becomes a central metaphor for a country that can't agree on anything. It also touches on America's fixation with online conspiracy theories, political correctness, the Black Lives Matter movement, and white privilege. In many ways, the town serves as a microcosm of the United States. On paper, this all sounds splendid. The problem is that Eddington barely scratches the surface of the topics it raises. Its commentary feels shallow, and its attempts at humour often come off as forced. It wants to be clever and biting, but ends up being more smug than insightful. The plot kicks off when Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to wear a mask at the local convenience store. His small yet defiant gesture leads to him deciding to run for mayor. He positions himself in direct opposition to the current mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who's enforcing strict mask mandates. But this isn't just a political standoff. It's personal. We learn that Joe's wife, Louise (Emma Stone), shares a complicated past with Ted. The campaign quickly spirals into a battleground of clashing ideologies. The film then takes an unexpected turn. When several murders are committed, it starts to enter Coen Brothers territory. Although, it plays more like imitation than homage. Still, there are things to admire. Joaquin Phoenix delivers a strong performance as a sheriff no one respects. Emma Stone is equally compelling, even with minimal dialogue. I was less impressed by Austin Butler, whose character felt underwritten and borderline cartoonish. Ari Aster has always excelled at turning ordinary situations into arenas of existential horror. But here, his usual flair for emotional tension is replaced by a kind of self-conscious quirk. The tone is inconsistent. It goes from deadpan humour to surface-level social commentary. It tries to make you laugh and shock you without fully committing to either pursuit. Visually, the film has its moments. Darius Khondji's camerawork impresses in a few sequences, but even that can't save the script's unevenness. Eddington follows a similar structure to that of Beau Is Afraid. Both begin in grounded reality and slowly unravel into exaggerated chaos. At least with Beau Is Afraid, the absurdity was unpredictable. With Eddington, the plot escalates, but never quite evolves. It doesn't land on any revelations. Unlike directors like Charlie Kaufman or Luis Buñuel, who use absurdity to interrogate meaning, Aster stops at the surface. This is ultimately what I found most frustrating about the film. It had so much potential. What could have been a vital cultural reckoning is reduced to a series of shallow jabs. In the end, Eddington is not a total disaster. It's a missed opportunity. Aster might have thought that his film is unmasking a nation in crisis, but it ends up revealing little more than a blank expression.
Vogue
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
On the Podcast: Hailey Bieber's Summer 2025 Cover Story—and the Best Films at Cannes So Far
It's been six years since Hailey Bieber last appeared one the cover of Vogue, and let's just say that a lot has changed. Now, the founder and face of Rhode, one of the most talked-about celebrity skincare brands out there, is also a mom to nine-month-old Jack Blues. On this episode of The Run-Through, marking Bieber's Summer 2025 cover story, writer Alessandra Codinha sits down with Chloe Malle and deputy editor Taylor Antrim. They revisit Codinha's time with Bieber, during which they discussed everything from the intense scrutiny she faces online to her relationship with her husband, Justin, and her difficult birthing experience. But first: British Vogue's Radhika Seth reports live from the Cannes Film Festival. She recaps her favorite films so far—and the buzzy ones she's most looking forward to. (As Taylor notes, 'deranged mothers' seem to be trending this movie season, with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson's Die, My Love making headlines after its festival premiere.) Radhika also weighs in on the controversy swirling around Eddington, Ari Aster's much-hyped follow-up to Beau Is Afraid (spoiler alert: it didn't make her top picks). Tune in to the conversation—which includes their highlights from Cannes's all-important red carpet—up above.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Eddington' Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Square Off in Ari Aster's Brazenly Provocative Western Thriller, Set During the Pandemic the Film Says Made America Lose Its Mind
It's all too common today to see ambitious filmmakers turns their movies into 'statements' that fit all too neatly into preset ideological boxes. But in 'Eddington,' his teasingly audacious, bracingly outside-the-box cosmic sociological Western thriller, writer-director Ari Aster ('Beau Is Afraid,' 'Midsommar') gleefully tosses any hint of liberal art-house orthodoxy to the winds. The film is set in the desert city of Eddington, New Mexico, during the COVID summer of 2020, and the first indication that it's going to offer a major tweak of conventional wisdom is that the protagonist, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who's the city sheriff, is just about the only person in town who refuses to wear a face mask. He's an asthmatic, but he's also got a brazen contempt for the COVID stats about transmission, and for the general notion of lockdown. Is his stance speaking for the movie's? That's tougher to pin down, since Joe, on the one hand, is the character we're asked to identify with, but Phoenix plays him as a shambolic screw-up, earnest and benign but basically a walking mess. More from Variety Japanese Horror 'Never After Dark' Acquired by XYZ Films From 'House of Ninjas' Team (EXCLUSIVE) Kristen Stewart Says It's a 'Bulls-- Fallacy' That You Need 'Experience' to Direct: 'It's a Real Male Perspective' and 'Anyone Can Make a Movie if They Have Something to Say' Tom Hollander Joins Jean Reno in Tom Edmunds' Action-Thriller 'The Butler' (EXCLUSIVE) Not long into the film, the George Floyd murder occurs, and the protests that take place in Minneapolis and other American cities trigger a small local movement in Eddington of anti-racist youth. The film is unambiguous about portraying them as a pack of deluded narcissists whose conception of themselves exemplifies the very privilege they're out to overthrow. Aster isn't merely mocking them; his real point is that moralistic self-righteousness has become a kind of addiction in America. Nevertheless, 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. Actually, it's not nearly so simple. 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. But COVID is just the trigger. 'Eddington,' while not a comedy, presents an angry, sinister, and maybe crazy new America that it views with a deadpan tone of trepidatious glee. And the movie presents us with a fully scaled vision of that transformed society. As Aster presents it, what happened to American is about COVID and everything the relentless rules of the pandemic did to us. It's about the rise of the new scolding moral absolutism. It's about how conspiracy theory, which used to be province of the liberal-left, became the new crackpot paradigm of Middle America, to the point that attacking the government for lies and coverups (like, you know, the plandemic) went from being a rebel stance to a kind of topsy-turvy authoritarian reflex. It's also about the creeping paranoia of gun culture, and about the paranoia that has gathered around the all-too-real issue of pedophilia (a trend that actually started with the day-care abuse trials and missing-children milk cartons of the 1980s, then picked up contemporary steam with QAnon and Pizzagate). It's about how social media became a dark hall of mirrors that magnified these toxic forces, to the point that the distorting of reality almost seemed to be the buried reason for it all. And it's about the ominous rise of big tech (embodied here by a massive proposed data center from a corporation called solidgoldmagikarp), which is both the orchestrator and beneficiary of that hall of mirrors. That sounds like a lot for a movie to chew on, but 'Eddington,' for all its heady themes, is a far more nimble and relatable entertainment that Aster's last film, the masochistic surrealist art nightmare 'Beau Is Afraid.' The new movie is two-and-a-half-hours long, and it ultimately does take a turn into something ominously out there. But for most of it Aster lures us in by telling a grounded and weirdly arresting story, which the age-of-the-pandemic themes sort of flow through. It all begins with Phoenix's desperate, lackadaisical, borderline incompetent sheriff coming under fire for his anti-mask stance, then making the decision to challenge the city's mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), with his posh backers and facile grin. Joe decides to run for mayor himself, but these two men have an enmity that reaches back to a buried personal scandal: Twenty years before, Garcia slept with Louise (Emma Stone) when she was 16 and got her pregnant. She had an abortion and went on to marry Joe. Joe and her are still together, living in an isolated ranch house atop a small mesa (along with Louise's blustery mom, played by Deirdre O'Connell; she moved in during COVID). But Louise has a history of mental illness, and Emma Stone plays her as the image of frail, washed-out vulnerability. The marriage is hanging by a thread, and the thread gets cut when Austin Butler, acting with the smoothness of the young Johnny Depp, shows up as Vernon, who's part of what appears to be a cult devoted to victims of child sexual abuse. Vernon sits in the Crosses' kitchen and tells his story, a piece of retrieved memory that replaced his other memories, and it's so garishly far out that we think: Is he about saving people or implanting them with new identities? More to the point: Is this what 'salvation' is becoming in America? Louise, in thrall to Vernon's therapeutic snake oil, has soon abandoned Joe, and this leaves him devastated. Aster is out to capture how the dislocation of reality that's becoming the coin of the realm isn't just a political/media phenomenon; its tentacles reach right into the heart of intimate relationships. And we see the same sort of social-turned-emotional freakout when the Black Lives Matter movement hits Eddington. The film never doubts the validity of the protests that rose up against the murder of George Floyd. But it does satirize the performative aspects of a certain brand of middle-class radicalism, and the way that this ensares various members of the community, like Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who becomes such a self-lacerating true believer that she starts to sound like a member of the Weather Underground; Brian (Cameron Mann), a local kid who starts out just wanting to flirt with Sarah, then finds his identity undergoing an extended mutation (with a real payoff at the end); and Michael (Micheal Ward), the Black cop who works for Joe and couldn't be more of a straight-arrow, but winds up the victim of a group of terrorist extremists who are out to 'save' him. There's no question that in 'Eddington' Art Aster makes himself a scalding provocateur, the same way Todd Field did in 'Tár' when he staged the confrontation at Julliard between Cate Blanchett's Lydia and the BIPOC student who questioned her devotion to dead-white-male composers. Yet as much as nailing down the precise point-of-view of 'Eddington' is bound to be the subject of numerous incendiary debates, I'd argue that this is very much not a case of Aster becoming some young A24-approved version of David Mamet. What he captures in 'Eddington' is an entire society — left, right, and middle — spinning out of control, as it spins away from any sense of collective values. The movie is about the center not holding, and you feel that refracted through every pleading stammer of Phoenix's alienated, sad-sack performance. It's not quite up there with his great ones, but it's not one of his mumbly showboat ones either. There's a bitter poignance to Joe, who's in way over his mussy-haired head. When he finally takes matters into his own hands, you keep rooting for him even as he does something indefensible. For a while, the film becomes a darkly ambling thriller, one that plays Joe's investigative team off the efforts of a local Pueblo officer, Butterly Jimenez (William Belleau), who we suspect might turn into our hero's version of Inspector Javert. But just when you think you've got 'Eddington' pinned down as a coherent and even conventional suspense tale, the movie wriggles out from under you and enters a terrain of stranger things. It doesn't get lost in the grim funhouse of its own conceits, the way 'Beau Is Afraid' did. But it does grow a little…abstract. There's an indulgent side to Ari Aster, and though it's more under control here, you can feel him giving him into it. Yet it's also inseparable from what makes him, in 'Eddington,' such a stimulating filmmaker. He wants to show us the really big picture, and while 'Eddington' isn't a horror film, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you'll recognize with a tremor. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
