Movie · 2025 · Western, Comedy, Crime · 2h 28m · R · English
Curator score: 3.8/10 (533.2K ratings)
Hindsight is 2020.
Overview
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.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.8/10
IMDb: 6.6/10
Letterboxd: 3.36/5
Metacritic: 65
TMDB: 6.5/10
Director
Ari Aster
Production
A24, Square Peg, 828 Productions, IPR.VC, Access Entertainment
Cast
Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone, Micheal Ward, Pedro Pascal, Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr., William Belleau, Austin Butler, Landall Goolsby, Elise Falanga, King Orba, Rachel de la Torre, David Pinter, Keith Jardine, David Midthunder, Juwan Lakota
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Viewers who like confrontational, conversation-starting films
Fans of dark satire and modern American nightmare stories
People interested in COVID-era social fracture and online misinformation
Ari Aster completists and admirers of formally aggressive filmmaking
Skip if
You want a straightforward political drama with clear moral framing
You’re sensitive to cynical, mean-spirited, or relentlessly bleak satire
You prefer tight genre plotting over thematic sprawl
You dislike films that feel intentionally divisive or self-consciously provocative
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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… more 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… more
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.
2007 · Crime, Thriller, Western · 2h 2m · R · Curator 9.6/10 (3.1M ratings) · Where to watch: fuboTV, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, MGM Plus, Philo
A stark American crime western where violence, fate, and moral exhaustion turn the landscape into a pressure chamber.
2022 · Comedy, Horror · 1h 47m · R · Curator 5.5/10 (3.5M ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A controlled, nasty satire that weaponizes class resentment, performance, and social cruelty.
Topics
dark satire, neo-western, political thriller, pandemic-era, social breakdown, media paranoia, black comedy, American anxiety, ensemble drama, bleak tone