Eddington

EDDINGTON   ***

Ari Aster

2025

IDEA:  In late May of 2020, a disaffected sheriff decides to contest the mayorship in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. 

BLURB:  Many years from now, if someone wanted to get a feeling for the American zeitgeist in the 2020s, Eddington might just be the exemplary representation in narrative fiction cinema from the era. Although perhaps strained in some of its appeals to “timeliness,” especially in its more stilted first half, the film is ultimately a scathing and viscerally unsettling portrait of a profoundly sick nation eating itself alive. Aster holds a magnifying glass up to much of what is deranged and broken about the US, especially as exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: rampant, targeted media disinformation and conspiracy-mongering, unchecked government corruption, non-functioning jurisprudence, and, as tragically as always, an insatiable appetite for and easy access to guns. It’s only appropriate that he should set this pitch-black satire of sociopolitical collapse within the framework of the classical Hollywood Western, with its mythological inscription of such bedrock American ideals as law, order, freedom, and individualism. Eddington pointedly and grimly undermines all of these codes; the civilizing process of the frontier is reversed as atomization and anomie replace social integration, and the white-hatted would-be hero, Sheriff Joe Cross, devolves into a feral, amoral chaos-agent who utterly fails as a man and a leader. In its harrowing last act, the film becomes not just an indictment of a society that has lost its tether to reality, but of the deeply insecure, morally feeble, and self-interested people in positions of power who exploit that fact so they can hold society captive and destroy it. There’s a lot one could take issue with in such a bold, politically fraught work, whether it’s overly broad or flippant observations (at times, the treatment of Black Lives Matter) or a defeatist sense of cynicism and misanthropy. If Eddington can get past some caveats, it’s because it’s absolutely vital to 2025, a much-needed, necessarily discomfiting, and even cathartic real-time processing of one of the US’s most cataclysmic national moments. 

AJ Goes to the Dog Park

AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK   **1/2

Toby Jones

2025

IDEA:  Upon discovering that his local dog park has been replaced by a "blog park," an incensed Fargo man decides to take on the Mayor by whatever means necessary.

BLURB:  The spirits of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, The Simpsons, and any number of lo-fi Adult Swim programs course through AJ Goes to the Dog Park, a proudly ridiculous film that operates on no other principle than untrammeled absurdism. There is a plot, and character development, and some faint themes about paternalism and obsession, but the film mostly proceeds as a loosey-goosey string of gags that treat space, time, matter, and the English language like Play-Doh. With echoes of the similarly Midwest-set Hundreds of Beavers, albeit on a more modest scale, AJ Goes to the Dog Park knows no bounds to the ways in which it will cartoonishly bend itself, whether through props, chromakey, exaggerated sound effects, non-sequiturs, or simply people acting very strangely. This is a film in which the main character turns into a dummy for a single shot so his head can be punched off and dunked into a basketball hoop by a burly man training him in the art of elbow fighting. There are people-shaped holes in doors, detours into comic-book art and parodic erotica, and nonsense wordplay that reinvents syntax (“Shall we? Let’s shall!,” or “No sir! Nor, no m’am!”). The result of all this is a cheerful semiotic breakdown that you rarely encounter in even the most outré of bigger-budget productions. While liberating for a while, the shenanigans can become tiring, and there’s little in the perfunctory camerawork or acting to keep the juices flowing for the full 75 minutes. Yet, how do you pick apart a movie this unpretentious, this scrappily creative and earnestly homegrown? The success of AJ Goes to the Dog Park is exactly in its transparent desire to be the kind of unassuming, DIY termite art it knows it is.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT   ***1/2

Raven Jackson

2023

IDEA:  A girl grows into womanhood in rural Mississippi.

BLURB:  Haptic cinema in the most intentional sense, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is designed to generate a flow of affect between bodies onscreen and off. Through protracted closeups — typically of hands that are reaching, grasping, holding, caressing, and always, always feeling — the film centers skin and the act of touch as our primary interfaces with the world, entangling the body of the spectator with the diegetic space. Jomo Fray’s rich, tactile cinematography, Lee Chatametikool’s elliptical but spare editing, and an ambient soundscape of insect drone and birdsong entrain us to a slower, thicker temporality, which is to say a deeply embodied one in which sensation supersedes narrative and cognition. In this sensory regime, existence is experienced as a shifting field of intensities where borders dissolve into a chiastic intercorporeality. Unsurprisingly, if perhaps too-pointedly, water in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is not just an aesthetic motif but a guiding metaphor (and synecdoche) for porous bodies that cry tears and absorb and transmit affect, memory, knowledge, and emotion. It’s possible Jackson could have been less withholding in regard to her characters and story, more willing to temper her abstractions with psychological interiority, but there’s something welcome about a portrait of black womanhood that denies such conventional apprehension. Here, we’re asked to feel from the inside rather than interpellate from without, and the results are often transcendent in their palpability.

Pecker

PECKER   ***1/2

John Waters

1998

IDEA:  After an amateur teen photographer becomes a sensation in the art world for his vérité pictures of his neighborhood, his real life and his community fall apart. 

BLURB:  A blasé outsider artist from suburban Baltimore has his work co-opted by the art-world establishment and assimilated into the elite culture of the urban intelligentsia. It’s hard not to read Pecker as John Waters’s self-reflexive, ironic commentary on his own complicated relationship with the commercial mainstream. Like a more intentional version of the titular Pecker, he was transformed by tastemakers from an unapologetically transgressive enfant terrible to a branded auteur sanctioned by Hollywood and the critical canon. In ways sincere and hilariously irreverent, Pecker uses the art/commerce opposition to satirize the way the capitalist image economy commodifies and fetishizes people's lives, makes a spectacle of consumption, and creates an artificial binary between “high” and “low” culture. The film’s giddy magic comes from how Waters collapses that division completely, with Pecker’s amateurish, impromptu photographs — often depicting scenes of social indecency — being hailed by the establishment as masterpieces of working-class authenticity. What’s trash and what’s art? Who gets to decide, and at what cost? The film, and Waters through it, argues that art can be found anywhere and in any thing, from laundromats and Virgin Mary shrines to go-go bars and thrift shops. And while the stuff that’s dirty, transgressive, and abject is often neutralized or expunged to be packaged for the mass market, sometimes, as the case happens to be in both the narrative and form of Pecker, they poke through with just enough queerness and uncontainable excess to resist capture.

The Phoenician Scheme

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME   ***1/2

Wes Anderson

2025

IDEA:  Hunted and sabotaged by his adversaries, a wealthy business tycoon embarks on a quest with his appointed heir - his only daughter - to convince his associates to fund his newest and biggest project. 

BLURB:  The title sequence of The Phoenician Scheme — a long-take, slow-motion overhead shot of a monochromatic and sparsely furnished bathroom — heralds a simpler Wes Anderson than we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade-plus. The ensuing film has few of his most extravagant (and irritating) formal indulgences: no meta framing device or laborious stories within stories, no chaotic profusions of onscreen text, no constant shifting between aspect ratios and time periods, and not as many elaborate camera movements or overstuffed images. There’s still a sprawling cast of characters, but the narrative is focalized around just two (maybe three) of them, harkening back to the more intimate emotional worlds of Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. At its core, The Phoenician Scheme is the story of an amoral megalomaniac finding spiritual redemption by reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This is old ground for Anderson, and arguably exhausted by this point, but the situational detail, humor, and pathos he brings to the characterizations of Zsa-Zsa Korda and Liesl are so finely realized it feels like a cleansing distillation rather than a retread. Benicio del Toro cuts a magnetic figure as a worldly, grandiose scoundrel, and Mia Threapleton is a mordant delight as the vexed novitiate daughter who grudgingly comes along on her father’s mission. Biblical allusions, transcultural mischief, and cinematic intertexts abound (hello, A Matter of Life and Death!), but the film moves with a streamlined linearity that never loses sight of the relationship at its center. The Phoenician Scheme wraps that affecting parent-child rapprochement in a witty fairytale adventure that also has something to say about the abuse of power in a global capitalist world (shades of a certain U.S. president-turned-felon are unmissable). Maybe a person like Korda being humbled is a fantasy in real life, but in Anderson’s malleable and merciful alternate universe, it’s blessedly achievable. 

You and the Night

YOU AND THE NIGHT   **1/2

Yann Gonzalez

2013

IDEA:  A collection of people, all dealing with some kind of loss, come together one night for an orgy.

BLURB:  In the liminal, deeply Freudian dream-space of You and the Night, archetypes are destabilized and primal narratives rewritten as a group of characters find release through the dissolution of boundaries. Ironizing the Breakfast Club-esque cast stereotypes, Gonzalez establishes a queer found family of profoundly fluid subject positions. From the fey maid Udo, who combines a godlike paternal omnipotence with sexual servility and maternal care; to the Stud, who represents a hysterical inversion of the role of the phallus as productive power symbol; to Ali and Matthias, who enact a gender-swapped Orphic narrative, the characters deform heteronormative roles, becoming bonded in a psychosocial structure where familial love and erotic intimacy are totally blurred. Although it’s self-reflexive and campy to the core, You and the Night is deadly serious about its characters’ emotional journeys, casting an earnestness over the film that at times dampens Gonzalez’s bawdy sense of play. What the film most excels at is creating a mood of hallucinatory atemporality, a cinematic purgatory constructed from fake backgrounds, deep shadow, neon color, and untraceable ambient sounds. It’s pure pastiche in the tradition of the New Queer Cinema, shot through with melodrama that attempts to reach the soul-churning heights of Fassbinder. You and the Night might not quite make it there, but its sense of renewal in loss, encapsulated in an anti-Orphic ending of trust and surrender set against a wintry sunrise, proves quite moving.

Sorry, Baby

Part of my coverage of the 12th Chicago Critics Film Festival.

SORRY, BABY   **1/2

Eva Victor

2025

IDEA:  An academic attempts to put her life back together in the wake of an assault by her professor.

BLURB:  Eva Victor is clearly a talent. In Sorry, Baby, she crafts a spunky, sarcastic, and deeply fraught character who is both instantly familiar and her own squirmy, idiosyncratic thing. With a countenance somehow simultaneously sleepy and mischievous, projecting both young-adult nonchalance and malaise, she makes Agnes into a memorably messy twenty-something comic heroine à la Greta Gerwig’s Frances Halladay, or Melanie Mayron’s Susan from Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. Like the films containing those characters, Sorry, Baby concerns the intimacy of female friendship and the experience of being a young woman at an uncertain, vulnerable life juncture. What Victor is tackling here is several magnitudes more harrowing, though, making the film’s negotiation of comedy and personal trauma feel quite audacious, if not totally successful. Often, Victor’s penchant for a sardonic crack results in glibness and contrived, self-flattering righteousness, as in a scene at a doctor’s office that’s meant to be feminist but mostly plays like unearned mockery. Sorry, Baby indicates some ways in which women are consistently let down by social systems, but rather than pursuing this thorny path it prefers a palatably bittersweet journey of self-healing that serves a good helping of platitudes along with the snippy bon mots. And yet Victor, at the center, is a lovably nervy presence, given strong support from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch in a poignant one-scene part. It’s a promising feature debut from a burgeoning auteur who, like Agnes, has plenty of time to grow.