Review: 'Eddington,' depicting the self-inflicted madness of the COVID-19 pandemic, is a horror show dressed as a satire

For much of its running time, writer-director Ari Aster’s darkly comical drama “Eddington” captures with brutal accuracy a part of the recent past — the panic and animosity that poured out when our brains broke during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And if you thought Aster’s earlier movies — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid” — were horror movies edging into surrealism, you haven’t seen anything yet.

It’s May 2020 in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, and nerves are frayed by the fears of the pandemic and the resentment of those told they have to wear masks or socially distance themselves. The main source of that resentment in Eddington is the sheriff of Sevilla County, Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Joe gets belligerent when he’s told he has to wear his face mask in public places, like the town grocery store. And a lot of his anger is directed at the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

Ted is running for re-election, on a platform of economic growth — mostly by touting the big data center that a tech conglomerate wants to build on the outskirts of town. The data center isn’t universally loved, as some in the city council are suspicious of Ted’s enthusiasm for the tech company’s plans, as well as the enormous water usage such a center requires.

Joe bundles up his grievances, and his personal beef with Ted (which is explained later), into a campaign to run against Ted for mayor. Joe turns the sheriff’s office into his campaign headquarters and orders his two deputies, Michael (Micheal Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes), to become his staff. He even covers his official sheriff’s SUV with campaign slogans that are notable for their conspiratorial messages and random punctuation.

Joe’s problems aren’t limited to his issues with Ted. At home, his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), is sleeping on their couch and pumping out conspiracy theories she finds online. These theories find a receptive audience in Dawn’s daughter, Ted’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who becomes fascinated by a New Age preacher, Vernon (played by Austin Butler). 

And to raise the tension level, some of the high school kids are starting street protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the kids leading the movement is Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who recently broke up with Michael, Joe’s deputy, who’s Black. Ted’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), and Eric’s best friend Brian (Cameron Mann), both have crushes on Sarah, and decide joining the protest movement is a good way to impress her.

Aster evokes the anxiety of those first COVID months, where people grasped onto whatever information they could find — and frequently found disinformation and took it for the truth. The town is a powder keg, and the leader who should be defusing the situation, Sheriff Joe, is lighting matches.

Phoenix gives a riveting performance, portraying Joe as the original emasculated incel, transmuting his home frustrations into a political statement. Phoenix leads a powerful ensemble that delivers strong performances, with O’Connell’s web-addicted conspiracy-monger topping the list.

The tension Aster builds up in the first 90 minutes — in a two-and-a-half hour movie — is so nerve-wracking that a viewer wonders how he will sustain it. The annoying thing is that he can’t, and Aster overcompensates with a hard swerve, from mocking conspiracy theories to leading us into one. The most terrifying thing about “Eddington” is Aster’s mind game, in which his depictions of right-wingers’ fever dream of a left-wing cabal lead us to the same messed-up government and public square that the non-fiction world got to through haphazard stupidity.

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‘Eddington’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, some grisly images, language, and graphic nudity. Running time: 148 minutes.

Review: 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' gets the legacy reboot/sequel it didn't deserve or need, but it could be a lot worse

The new legacy-sequel “I Know What You Did Last Summer” frequently falters, when director Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson can’t seem to decide whether she’s rebooting the 1997 slasher movie or creating a continuation of it. 

But when it settles into the business at hand, of creatively slaughtering 20-somethings who may or may not have deserve it, it’s not half bad.

Robinson, who co-wrote with Sam Lansky and devised the story with Leah McKendrick, takes us back to Southport, the North Carolina seaside town where a killer in a fisherman’s raincoat killed several people with a giant hook. Some of those people are among the five young folks who tried to cover up a hit-and-run fatality in which they were involved. The new movie reminds everyone that two of those five survived the brutality: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.). 

Before we get to them this time, we start with five new friends: Best pals Danica (Madilyn Cline) and Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica’s fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), Ava’s high-school boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), their old high school friend from whom the others had grown distant. On the night of Danica and Teddy’s engagement party, the five go driving on a dangerous curve, where through a moment of immaturity, they accidentally cause a pickup truck and his driver to careen off the road and into the rocks below. 

Ava and Stevie want to call 911, or at least go down and try to save the driver. But Teddy — whose rich dad (Billy Williams) runs the town and apparently grew up thinking the mayor in “Jaws” was the hero — urges the others to keep quiet, so their lives don’t get ruined.

Flash-forward a year, and those five aren’t doing so hot. Danica is preparing for a wedding, but not to Teddy, who’s a despondent drunk living on his dad’s houseboat. Stevie’s managing a bar owned by Ray from the first movie, and has grown close to Danica. And Ava is punishing herself through sexual encounters with random strangers — like Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel), whom Ava meets on the plane to Southport, which Tyler is visiting because she hosts a true-crime podcast and is fascinated by the 1997 killings.

At her bridal shower, Danica opens a card in which someone has written the fateful words: “I know what you did last summer.” And we’re off and running, with cast members being dispatched with a harpoon gun and the infamous giant hook.

Director Robinson has some fun staging the murders with a mix of ‘90s nostalgia and new-school creepiness, occasionally but not consistently landing some genuine scares. It’s fun to watch Wonders and Cline, running neck-and-neck for the title of the movie’s final girl, jump wholeheartedly into the franchise’s bloodshed. But Hewitt and Prinze, though they provide some of the movie’s strongest moments, also remind us that this franchise was never that good and we don’t need to take it that seriously, then or now.

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‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Smurfs' is a chaotic attempt to wring any humor, whimsy or anything genuine out of a classic cartoon franchise

Thankfully, I was seated away from small children when I attended a recent preview screening of “Smurfs,” the latest attempt to turn Peyo’s classic blue cartoon characters into a movie franchise — because I blurted out a word not appropriate for little ears.

It was in the first five minutes, when a character called No Name Smurf — lamenting that he doesn’t have a name that describes his occupation or other character trait, like the others — started singing, in the voice of James Corden, the movie’s “I want” song. What I muttered under my breath was, “Oh, Smurf me.” Except I didn’t say “Smurf.”

That turned out to be the high point of “Smurfs,” a chaotic mishmash of kid-movie plotting and amuse-the-grownups one-liners that tries to establish a heroic mythology for the Smurfs while also mocking the idea that such grandiosity should even exist. It’s a movie that might have looked good on paper at some point, in terms of pushing a brand toward a new audience, but makes no sense narratively, comedically or emotionally.

The Smurfs are happily partying when No Name gets hold of some magic book, called Jaunty (voiced by Amy Sedaris), and starts playing around with the magic powers the book bestows on him. That draws the attention of an evil wizard, Razamel (voiced by JP Karliak), who comes through a portal and kidnaps Papa Smurf (voiced by John Goodman).

After a few moments of panic in Smurf Village, it’s up to Smurfette — the only female Smurf, voiced by Rihanna (in fact, the movie’s tagline is “Rihanna is Smurfette”) — to lead a rescue party. The Smurfs venture through the portal, and end up in a live-action Paris, where they find some ninja Smurfs and Papa Smurf’s old friend Ken (voiced by Nick Offerman), who imparts the heroic backstory of how the Smurfs fought a group of evil wizards to protect all that’s good in the world. And now, the wizards are amassing again and must be taken down.

Arriving in Paris, director Chris Miller (A DreamWorks alum who directed the first “Puss in Boots”) and writer Pam Brady (“Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken”) open up more questions than answers. Among them: Why do the motivations of Razamel’s brother, the Smurfs’ longtime nemesis Gargamel (also voiced by Karliak), shift every 15 seconds? Or why is Paris depicted in live-action footage, but the human characters we meet there — like Razamel’s assistant, Joel (voiced by Dan Levy) — animated? And who in their right minds thought any of this was funny?

The songs are forgettable, even with Rihanna singing them. (Rihanna joins a list of pop singers who made some of their worst music while voicing Smurfette, a list that includes Katy Perry and Demi Lovato.) The animation style is a hybrid of Pixar-style computer animation and old-school line drawing, which produces the cheapest versions of both.

There’s a line toward the end, where Papa Smurf warns away the evil wizards by saying, “Don’t mistake our kindness for weakness.” That was the only moment of “Smurfs” that brought me joy, only because I started to imagine a certain segment of the Internet gearing up to declare “the Smurfs have gone woke” — and the thought that such people would waste their time getting mad about a movie so inconsequential made me smile.

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‘Smurfs’

★

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, language and some rude humor. Running time:  92 minutes; accompanied by a 3-minute “SpongeBob SquarePants” short, “Order Up.”

Review: 'Abraham's Boys' delivers a dark drama under the cloak of a vampire thriller, with a striking performance by Titus Welliver

Like Dracula’s cape, writer-director Natasha Kermani’s brooding thriller “Abraham’s Boys” comes cloaked in the trappings of the vampire myth — but the monster beneath is something else, creating a dark drama about loyalty and madness.

Taking a short story by horror writer Joe Hill, Kermani sets her drama in California’s Central Valley in 1915. It’s here, we’re told, that Abraham Van Helsing, the famed vampire hunter who drove a stake in Dracula’s heart 18 years earlier, has settled after fleeing the specter of vampires in Europe. Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, familiar to fans of “Bosch”) teaches his two sons — teen Max (Brady Hepner) and 12-year-old Rudy (Judah Mackey) — algebra and reading, while he also tends to his ailing wife, Mina (Jocelin Donahue).

Yes, Mina — known in Bram Stoker’s story as the wife of Jonathan Harker, and the object of Dracula’s eternal desire. Kermani’s script suggests an unfortunate fate for Jonathan, and that Van Helsing and Mina have created a life together, now threatened by the seeming return of the demons they fought in London and Amsterdam.

At least that’s the story Van Helsing has told Max, and the dark history he has kept from Rudy until now. As Mina’s condition worsens, and Van Helsing grows more secretive, Max starts to wonder how much of his father’s Dracula story is true.

The storytelling is spartan, with only a few side characters — such as Elsie (Aurora Perrineau), a mapmaker for the railroad that’s coming to end the Van Helsing family’s rural solitude. The focus is on the Van Helsings as they prepare to confront the evil that’s coming, as Max wrestles with Rudy’s question: What if something is already inside?

The highlight of “Abraham’s Boys” is seeing Welliver, a character actor who usually plays gruff cops or shady criminals, dig into a hard-edged, enigmatic character like this. Van Helsing, as a figure of literature and film, is more familiar with death than most, and Welliver helps us feel his acceptance of that painful fate.

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‘Abraham’s Boys’

★★★

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'Kill the Jockey' is a surreal tale of a self-destructive jockey that blends sexy, sweet and odd

Alternately funny, sexy, dark and weird, Argentine director Luis Ortega’s “Kill the Jockey” is a surreal take on obsession — which in this case can lead to the winner’s circle or a prison cell.

Remo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Buenos Aires jockey whose skill on a horse is matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. Still, he’s a winner, which is why the super-rich — and possibly gangster — Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho) continues to choose him to ride his prize horses. When Sirena has a new thoroughbred coming from Japan, he picks Remo over an ambitious young jockey, Abril (Úrsula Corberó), who’s eager to impress Sirena and launch her career.

Abril is working against the clock, because she’s pregnant and Remo is the father — though she’s not sure about a long-term relationship with someone so unstable. When Remo asks what he can do for Abril to love him again, she responds, “die and be reborn.” While she’s dealing with him, Abril also most contend with Sirena’s fixation on babies, and her attraction to the other woman jockey in the locker room, Ana (played by the dynamic Chilean actor Mariana Di Girólamo). 

Trying to pin down Ortega’s directing style, I’d put it at 40% Pedro Almodovar, 40% Wes Anderson and about 20% David Lynch. There’s a volatile and endearing mix of sexiness, sweetness and strangeness that propels the movie, and Ortega (who wrote the script with Rodolfo Palacios and Fabian Casas) shows the confidence to make it work, even as Remo goes on a journey of discovery and comes out the other side quite changed.

Pérez Biscayart brings a delicate blend of humor and sadness to the performance, with a deadpan look reminiscent of Buster Keaton. He also plays well against Corberó, who has to weigh her drive to race against her feelings for two lovers. The chemistry is dynamite, and makes “Kill the Jockey” deliciously hard to resist.

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‘Kill the Jockey’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 11, in theaters. Not rated, but probably R for strong violence, some sexual situations, and language. Running time: 97 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Superman' puts the fun back into comic-book movies, by stripping out the well-worn mythology and getting to the good stuff

It’s been 87 years since two sons of Jewish immigrants created a hero who came from a distant place, grew up among us, and tried to make things better for the regular person — so it’s quite something that watching another telling of that story, in writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman,” feels like a subversive act. 

Gunn has the tough assignment of not only telling a familiar story — about a space alien with incredible powers in disguise as an American farm boy working as a newspaper reporter — but relaunching an entire franchise around him and other DC Comics’ characters. In terms of action and tone, Gunn strikes a nicely calibrated balance between movie myth-making and the inherent goofiness of heroes wearing capes.

We already knew Gunn could toss together a motley crew of imperfect heroes — because he did it for Marvel with three “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, and with an earlier DC configuration in “The Suicide Squad.” Now he takes one of DC’s signature creations (the other is Batman) and makes it fun and meaningful.

Gunn dispenses with the origin story — no sense remaking the iconic scenes of Marlon Brando’s godlike Jor-El in the 1978 “Superman” — and drops us right in the action. Superman, we’re told, has just lost his first battle, to a rival Metahuman (that’s DC’s name for unusually powered people) called The Hammer of Boravia. We’re also told that Boravia and a neighboring country, Jarhanpur, were on the brink of war until Superman intervened. 

Superman (played by David Corenswet) finds his unilateral peacemaking has cause suspicion at the Pentagon and one of the military’s leading contractors, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). We soon learn that Luthor is secretly assisting the Boravian president (Zlatko Buric), in part by creating the myth of “The Hammer of Boravia” using his own Metahuman. 

After healing up in his antarctic sanctuary — we never hear the name “Fortress of Solitude” — with his super-dog, Krypto (who steals every scene he’s in), Superman returns to Metropolis and his day job as Clark Kent, reporter for The Daily Planet. Clark engages in some sharp banter with the Planet’s ace reporter, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), which makes it more surprising a couple of scenes later, when Lois comes home to find Clark cooking her dinner. 

Gunn has smartly skipped over Lois and Superman’s courtship, and the increasingly stupid plot thread that the sharpest reporter at Metropolis’ greatest newspaper couldn’t figure out Superman’s secret identity. (There’s a throwaway joke on the topic of disguises that’s catnip for comic-book nerds.) Gunn also casts his leads to perfection, with Brosnahan hitting the right blend of Lois’ wit and cynicism, and young Corenswet bringing a charm to the dual role that we haven’t seen since Christopher Reeve. 

And Gunn conceives Lex Luthor as a villain for this moment: A tech billionaire whose greed and ambition is matched only by his pettiness, someone who masterminds a campaign against Superman based on xenophobia, disinformation and media manipulation. Rarely has the end-credits disclaimer that “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental” gotten this much of a workout.

Like his former colleagues at Marvel, Gunn also seeds the field with supporting superheroes, starting the process of building a movie universe from the ground up. Here, we get the stirrings of a corporate-backed team of heroes, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, one of the iterations of Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, and in particular Edi Gathegi as the intriguingly named Mr. Terrific. Gunn deploys them, along with the movie’s cameos and Easter eggs, skillfully, never letting them distract us from the Man of Steel’s story. 

The best thing Gunn brings to “Superman,” though, is a sense that comic-book movies are supposed to be fun and a little bit silly, as any endeavor involving people in tights should be. If he can keep that spirit alive through future DC Comics movies, without the narrative bloat or grandiose self-importance that has hobbled other franchises, that would be truly super.

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‘Superman’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, action and language. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: '40 Acres' wraps an emotional family drama inside a tight post-apocalyptic thriller, and gets maximum mileage out of star Danielle Deadwyler

A tight post-apocalyptic thriller that’s also a deeply felt family drama, director R.T. Thorne’s “40 Acres” is an uncomfortably timely story of survival in a world that’s falling apart.

The Freeman family lives on a farm in rural Canada, one that’s well protected with an electrified fence, surveillance cameras, and a whole lot of family members who can shoot accurately and kill with practically no compunction. The mom, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), is a former soldier, and has imparted that warrior mentality into her own children and the step-kids she shares with her husband, Galen (Michael Greyeyes).

The title cards at the movie’s start sets up the scenario. It’s been 14 years since a fungal pandemic wiped out 98% of animal life, a dozen years since a second Civil War broke out, and 11 years since a famine struck. What little workable farmland still exists, like the Freemans’ farm, is highly valuable — and there are people who will kill for it. Hence the security set-up and Hailey’s insistence that the kids study hard and practice their marksmanship.

Hailey’s oldest, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), is a teen who’s starting to feel the stress of always being under his mother’s domination. He goes out on a scavenger run, and comes across a compound with a fair number of people. When he stops at a creek for a swim, he also sees someone from that compound, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), who’s around his age, and he’s smitten. Emanuel knows his mother would never allow a stranger onto their farm, so he’s torn about what to do next.

In the basement safe room of the Freeman farm, Hailey keeps in contact with neighboring farms via ham radio — particularly with Augusta (Elizabeth Saunders), a crusty survivor who trades her moonshine for samples of Freemans’ marijuana crop. Augusta warns Hailey that other families have gone silent, and that a marauding band of cannibals is roaming nearby.

Thorne’s story — he co-wrote the screenplay with Glenn Taylor, and developed the story with Lora Campbell — is steeped in history, both national and personal. The Freemans, we’re told, have held the farm for nearly two centuries, back when they escaped the South during the first Civil War. It’s Hailey’s legacy, and she and her family have fought so hard for it that no pack of vandals is going to take it from them now. She’s also determined to leave that legacy for Emanuel, so much so that she doesn’t recognize the generational trauma she’s also passing down.

All of this drama plays out in one of the sharpest end-of-the-world thrillers I’ve seen since Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later.” And the drama and the action work in tandem, with Thorne’s blocking of the action sketching out the geography of the Freeman farm, giving us a visual touchstone to match the emotional importance Hailey assigns to the place. 

Deadwyler gives a performance that’s brimming with tension, as she’s fiercely insistent that her family remain vigilant in the face of unknown threats. O’Connor, playing the questioning Emanuel, matches Deadwyler’s intensity note for note. And Greyeyes finds some needed humor in Galen, a First Nations member who delights in playing against Indigenous stereotypes.

Thorne is a veteran of episodic TV and music videos, and “40 Acres” is his first feature film. He’s got the skills to make more, and an uncanny gift for wrapping big ideas in genre disguise.

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’40 Acres’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 2, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content and language. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Jurassic World: Rebirth' offers a lineup of new characters, but the same old dinosaur action

“Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the seventh in the franchise that started with Steven Spielberg’s masterfully entertaining “Jurassic Park,” the last word in the title suggests that we’re starting fresh — which we are, in a way, because we’re getting new characters we haven’t met before. 

In more basic terms, and in keeping with the genetic splicing and playing with God that have been the impetus of the series for 32 years, what “Rebirth” really means is that we’re getting a clone, a copy of a copy of a copy.

It’s a few years after the events of the last movie, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” and a few things have changed. For starters, people are bored with dinosaurs again, in part because they couldn’t survive in temperate climates and are out of sight in a few areas in the tropics, where international law says humans can’t go. Also, the movie gods have decided we don’t need Chris Pratt, which may be the one thing this new movie gets inarguably correct.

Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a Big Pharma weasel, wants someone to go to those tropics, to get DNA samples from some of those dinosaurs — because the genetic material could produce some wonder drugs, which Krebs’ company would make billions developing. He offers a whopping amount of money to Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary who’s quite savvy at getting in and out of places where one isn’t supposed to go.

Zora teams up with an old friend, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who has a boat and a crew who can deliver Zora and Krebs to an island where InGen, the company that first developed the genetic tech that created the original Jurassic Park dinosaurs, has its secret lab. There, we’re told, is where the creatures too nasty for the tourists was left behind.

Zora brings along one more expert: A paleo-biologist, Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, from “Wicked”) — a hunk-with-glasses nerd who fills the story space once occupied by Sam Neill’s Alan Grant. (Screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the first “Jurassic Park” with novelist Michael Crichton, name-drops Grant late in the film, the only character connection from this film to any other.)

While the crew is heading toward the equator, and Koepp provides them enough backstory so Johansson and Ali can tell themselves they’re doing more than yelling “Run!” a lot, there’s a parallel adventure involving a family sailing trip. Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his two daughters, little Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and college-bound Teresa (Luna Blaise), along with Teresa’s layabout boyfriend, Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono), are crossing the Atlantic when they run into some whale-like dinos. They cross paths with Zora, Duncan and company, as well as some land-based dinosaurs.

Director Gareth Edwards, the guy behind “Rogue One” and “The Creator,” knows how to make action movies that set human-scaled drama amid massive special effects. (Seek out his low-budget 2010 debut, “Monsters,” and his 2014 take on “Godzilla” as evidence.) Here, he shows his influences: One action sequence on Duncan’s boat evokes the second half of Spielberg’s “Jaws,” while a set piece in a crawlspace is reminiscent of scenes from “Alien.” 

Koepp keeps the self-references to “Jurassic Park” locked and loaded at all times, particularly in the dispatching of one baddie contains nods to Wayne Knight’s Nedry, Samuel L. Jackson’s arm and the lawyer eaten alive on the toilet. And, for good measure, composer Alexandre Desplat seems contractually bound to play John Williams’ original theme every two minutes. 

In the end, “Jurassic Park Rebirth” is the story of a group of people hoping for a big paycheck by repurposing existing DNA without considering the consequences of what they’re doing. That’s the plot synopsis and a recap of the film’s production.

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‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference. Running time: 134 minutes.