Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

“I’m personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now,” the writer-director Ari Aster tells Adam Howard, a senior producer of the Radio Hour. “ ‘Eddington’ is a film about a bunch of people who . . . know that something’s wrong. They just—nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Many of us would prefer to forget a fearful time like the spring and summer of 2020, but Aster is relentless about putting his characters and his audience in states of anxiety, whether in his horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” or in the more genre-bending “Beau Is Afraid.” “Eddington,” his latest, is a neo-noir Western featuring a gun-toting, libertarian sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who confronts COVID, the George Floyd protests, and a mysterious A.I. data center that’s being built in his county. It’s like a hand grenade tossed into the traditional summer-movie season. The film is unapologetically political, but its satire doesn’t spare either side of the aisle. “My concern,” Aster admits, “is that I don't know how much of a hunger people have anymore for anything controversial or challenging.”

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Patrick Radden Keefe on “London Falling,” His Book About a Teen-Ager’s Mysterious Life and Death

Patrick Radden Keefe on “London Falling,” His Book About a Teen-Ager’s Mysterious Life and Death

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Anna Wintour as Vogue Icon

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The New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas, who writes the Sporting Scene column, talks with David Remnick about the biggest basketball stories this season: how LeBron James embraced a new late-career ...

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In 2021, when Olga Rudenko and other journalists launched the English-language news outlet the Kyiv Independent, they were committed to making a publication that wouldn’t face political pressure from ...

3 Huhti 36min

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