Eddington gets the pandemic right but still isn’t a great movie
A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.
Eddington, Aster's latest, feels like a continuation of the maximalist guilt-trip Beau Is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix stars once again, though the concerns here are less Jewish and Oedipal and more wokeness and conspiracy theories. It's grounded in the contemporary: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically. The movie's …