Latest news with #AriAster
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Eddington' trailer: Ari Aster, Pedro Pascal, and Joaquin Phoenix deliver a COVID-19 thriller
All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. In his fourth feature film Eddington, writer/director Ari Aster revisits the tensions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. While Aster became known for horror films like Hereditary and Midsommar, he moves away from the genre with Western thriller Eddington, just as he did in his third feature, the darkly comedic epic Beau is Afraid. And just like with that big swing — which also starred Joaquin Phoenix — critical reception of Eddington is mixed, following the film's premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. However, there's been enough praise to pepper this trailer with pullquotes. SEE ALSO: Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix on 'Beau Is Afraid's most challenging scene Eddington stars Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as a dueling sheriff and mayor in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. Pascal plays progressive Mayor Ted Garcia, whose response to the COVID-19 pandemic has earned the ire of Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix). When Joe challenges Ted in Eddington's next mayoral election, he'll create a rivalry that threatens disaster for the entire town. SEE ALSO: Please stop killing Pedro Pascal! Ted and Joe's showdown allows Aster to examine differing reactions to COVID-19. So, the trailer touches on masking, nasal swabs, and social distancing guidelines. The film's 2020 setting also means Eddington taps into Black Lives Matter protests over racial division and the death of George Floyd. Another key element of Eddington is the way social media and social isolation combined to create the perfect storm for people to latch onto conspiracy theories. Look no further than Joe's wife Louise (Emma Stone), who becomes obsessed with a cult leader played by Austin Butler. How will all this play out to audiences? We'll find out when Eddington hits theaters July 18.
BBC News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Superman to I Know What You Did Last Summer: 10 of the best films to watch this July
From Superman to I Know What You Did Last Summer – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month. Eddington Best known as the horror auteur who chilled audiences with Hereditary and Midsommar, Ari Aster moves on to state-of-the-nation satirical comedy with his latest film, Eddington. The title is the name of a small desert town in New Mexico where the sheriff, Joaquin Phoenix, is at loggerheads with the business-minded mayor, Pedro Pascal. Their feud has something to do with the sheriff's wife, Emma Stone, but it spirals out of control in 2020 when the town is hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Aster "transforms everyday American insanity into one of the most artistically complete and compulsively watchable doom-scrolls of the year", says Tomris Laffly in Elle. "It's insightful, gloriously bonkers, and often very funny… both the definitive Covid movie and a modern-day Western of sorts, culminating into a superbly directed and gradually darkening finale." Released on 18 July in the US and on 24 July in Australia Heads of State What is it about US Presidents becoming action heroes at the moment? In April, Viola Davis was a gun-toting, butt-kicking POTUS in G20. Now, Heads of State has John Cena as a President who used to be a Hollywood actor, and Idris Elba as the UK's Prime Minister. When their plane is shot down over hostile territory, they have to battle their way back to civilisation, with some help from a supporting cast that includes Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jack Quaid and Paddy Considine. Directed by Ilya Naishuller, this action comedy probably won't win many Oscars, but Naishuller's last film, Nobody, had some of the best fight scenes in years, and Cena proved in The Suicide Squad that he knows how to send up his tough-guy image. "This one was pretty much just me getting beat up, and that is my forte," Cena said on ExtraTV. "We have a little introduction as to who these people are, and then once it jumps off, you are on the edge of your seat the whole time. Once it goes, it doesn't stop." Released on Prime Video on 2 July internationally Together Allison Brie and Dave Franco, a real-life married couple, star in this icky horror drama as another couple, Millie and Tim, who may be a little too closely entwined for their own good. They move from Melbourne to the Australian countryside, where Millie is starting a teaching job. After Tim drinks some stagnant water in a mysterious cave, he can't bear to be apart from Millie, but when he touches her, their bodies start to fuse together. Written and directed by Michael Shanks, Together currently has a 100% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews round-up site – but whether it would work as a date movie is open to debate. "This delightfully unhinged spin on the body horror joint… should leave audiences yelping and tittering in equal measure," says Kate Erbland in IndieWire. "It's hard not to get pulled into the spectacle, stuck to the story, really connected to this crowd-pleasing (and -screaming) little ditty of a midnight treat." Released on 30 July in the US, Canada and the UK, and on 31 July in Australia 40 Acres The debut film from writer-director RT Thorne is a dystopian survival thriller set in Canada. Animals have been wiped out by a pandemic, and food is scarce, so if you are lucky enough to have your own farm, you might be inclined to build a high fence around it, and do whatever it takes to keep gangs of hungry strangers outside. The farmers on this particular property are people of colour – Danielle Deadwyler plays a matriarch with a military background, and her husband is played by a First Nations actor, Michael Greyeyes – which gives 40 Acres another layer of complexity: enslaved people were promised homesteads of "not more than 40 acres" after the American Civil War. The film is full of gory action, but, according to Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap, it has some profound issues in mind. "Is there room for community and care when everyone is at each other's throats in what was already a painful existence? The question remains the main point of thematic tension with no easy answers as we follow a family struggling to find a way forward together." Released on 2 July in the US Superman Superman is the first film in the new DC Universe, as revamped by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad). It looks as if it might be more cheerful than Zack Snyder's moody Man of Steel (2013): the trailers don't just feature Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), but the outlandish likes of the Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Superman's robot assistants, and Krypto the Superdog. But what can we hope for from Superman himself, as played by David Corenswet? "We can expect a Superman who is about the compassion of the human spirit," Gunn said in Screen Brief. "Yes, he's an alien from another planet who's super powerful, but he is also deeply, deeply human… This is about a complex character, and I think that's the thing that audiences are going to be completely surprised by." Released from 8 July internationally Smurfs A tribe of tiny, brightly coloured, music-loving humanoids who live in a forest village? Over the past decade, the most popular characters who met that description were the Trolls, not the Smurfs: Trolls was a disco-powered smash in 2016, and Smurfs: The Lost Village couldn't match it a year later. Still, maybe the latest Smurfs film, in which animated Smurfs are zapped to a live-action Paris, will put them back on top. The biggest selling point is Rihanna, who voices the Smurfette and contributes new songs (the working title was The Smurfs Musical). But Peyo's original Belgian comic strips were what mattered to the director, Chris Miller (Puss in Boots). "The DNA in Peyo's original drawings guides so many creative choices in the film," Miller said at last year's Annecy Animation Festival. "All of the action lines and thought bubbles from the comics are going in the movie, and the comics have inspired the style of animation to be fun and buoyant, with plenty of squash and stretch." Released from 16 July internationally I Know What You Did Last Summer In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, which came out in 1997, a group of teenagers ran someone over in their car, fled the scene of the crime, and were hunted down by a serial killer known as the Fisherman. The film set off a craze for teen slasher films in the 1990s, alongside Scream (which had the same screenwriter, Kevin Williamson). And now that the Scream franchise is back, maybe it was inevitable that I Know What You Did Last Summer would follow. This legacy sequel has a new set of teens, and another car accident, but it's set in the same universe as the first film, and features Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr as the two survivors of the first killing spree, Julie and Ray. "I came to this originally wanting to dig into: if this thing had happened to you, how would that shape you, and what person do you become after it?" Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the writer-director, said in Entertainment Weekly. "So really wanting to look at both Ray and Julie and say, 'Okay, how did this thing shape both of them and where would they be today?'" Released from 16 July internationally The Fantastic Four: First Steps Once a decade, it seems, someone tries to launch a big-screen franchise based on Marvel comics' first superhero team, the Fantastic Four. There was a 2005 film, which was successful enough to merit a sequel, and then there was Josh Trank's dark reboot in 2015, which wasn't. And now, in 2025, there is yet another version – but it looks a lot more fantastic than the others. The team is now played by Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby (who shares a surname with the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, legendary artist Jack Kirby), Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. The twist is that the film isn't set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but a parallel reality which is a bright and shiny space-aged, 1960s utopia. "This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race," Matt Shakman, the director, said in Empire magazine. "It's about JFK and optimism. It's imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This idea is that they are the most famous people in America, because they're adventurers, explorers, astronauts – not because they're superheroes." Released from 23 July internationally Apocalypse in the Tropics The state of Brazil's democracy is firing up film-makers at the moment: see last year's Oscar-winning I'm Still Here, and the forthcoming Cannes award-winner The Secret Agent. In the documentary field, Petra Costa's personal take on her country's political divisions, The Edge of Democracy, was Oscar-nominated in 2020. And now she returns with Apocalypse in the Tropics, which examines the influence that evangelical Christian leaders have over voters: former president Jair Bolsanaro was embraced by Christians and nicknamed "the Messiah". Costa "explores the history of evangelism to try and grasp how its apocalyptic visions managed to capture the hearts and minds of so many Brazilians", says Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter. "By doing so, she sheds light on a phenomenon present not only in Brazil and America, but in countries around the world where 'faith in progress and democracy' is currently being tested like never before." Released Netflix on 14 July internationally Jurassic World Rebirth Jurassic World Rebirth is a Jurassic World reset. The last film in the dino-series, 2022's Jurassic World Dominion, was a globe-trotting action caper with science-fiction and spy-thriller elements, whereas the new one goes back to basics: it's written by David Koepp, who scripted the first two Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park films, and it returns to the classic concept of having a small band of intrepid adventurers (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend) being trapped on a tropical island with some hungry prehistoric animals. The director, Gareth Edwards, demonstrated his skill with CGI behemoths in Godzilla (2014) and his low-budget debut, Monsters (2010), but in this instance he's happy to pay loving homage to Spielberg. Jurassic World Rebirth "really does feel that it's welcoming people to celebrate the original film", Bailey said in Empire magazine. "It has that wonder and awe, while not being scared to re-inject the thrill and the fear." Released in cinemas internationally from 2 July -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Geek Tyrant
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
New Trailer for Ari Aster's EDDINGTON - "We Are in a Fight Against Evil" — GeekTyrant
A24 has released a new trailer for director Ari Aster's new film Eddington , and it offers more footage from the film and insight into the story and the characters that fill it. This intense-looking movie is described as a modern Western set during the COVID pandemic. In the film, 'A standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.' As you'll see there's a lot of tension building in this small town and it looks like it's going to escalate into complete violent insanity. Phoenix and Pascal are joined by Austin Butler, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr. and William Belleau. When talking about working with Phoenix, Aster said: 'Having now worked with him, I understand why he is so reluctant to jump onto anything — because he really puts all of himself into whatever he's doing. The way that he challenges the material — not in a gratuitous way or in a way that's a pain in the ass. 'The question usually amounts to 'Is there anything we haven't considered here?' I realized that it's something that I was really wanting from an actor, and now I can't imagine making a film without him.' Eddington is set to open in competition at Cannes. It will be released in the US on July 18.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bugonia: first trailer for new Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos collaboration
The first trailer for Bugonia has arrived, offering a first look at the latest collaboration between Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone. The acclaimed Greek film-maker and the American actor have previously worked on The Favourite, Poor Things and, most recently, Kinds of Kindness. The relationship has netted Stone an Oscar nomination and a win. Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! from South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan. It tells the story of two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a corporation convinced she is a dangerous alien. Stone is joined by her Kinds of Kindness co-star Jesse Plemons while Alicia Silverstone and comedian Stavros Halkias also appear. The film is also produced by Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster who recently directed Stone in Covid-set comedy western Eddington which premiered to mixed reviews at this year's Cannes film festival. The screenplay comes from Will Tracy who has worked on Succession and also written the script for comedy thriller The Menu. He created 2024's HBO series The Regime, a satire starring Kate Winslet that received mostly negative reviews. Lanthimos spoke about the movie in a interview with The Playlist last year: Well, actually just this one is one of the few times that I read a script that I hadn't generated or I hadn't been developing for a long time, and I was immediately drawn to it. And then I did a little bit of work with the writer Will Tracy in order to make it a little bit more my own. It's just one of these things that something clicks in the story, in the tone. Again, something you probably haven't done before, working with the same actors, like working with Emma again and Jesse, it's just exciting to get into it, do something different, but also with that kind of familiarity. Lanthimos is also attached to an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation and an adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's assassin thriller Fatale. Stone is set for an untitled romantic comedy directed by her husband Dave McCary while Plemons, who was recently seen in Netflix's thriller series Zero Day, will appear alongside Tom Cruise in Alejandro González Iñárritu's untitled new comedy. Bugonia has been tipped to premiere at this year's Venice film festival given that Lanthimos has premiered a number of his movies there before. The film will be released in cinemas in October.
The Verge
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Things are heating up in Eddington, New Mexico.
Posted Jun 26, 2025 at 2:59 PM UTC Things are heating up in Eddington, New Mexico. Our first look at Ari Aster's upcoming feature Eddington made it seem like a pandemic-era drama, but the film's latest trailer makes it feel like it's going to be more of a politically-charged thriller when it hits theaters on July 18th.
