With Eddington, Hollywood Finally Starts To Reckon With the Madness of 2020 |
Culture
Peter Suderman | 12.31.2025 9:55 AM
With Trump in office again and a nebulous vibe shift or two fully underway, 2025 sometimes felt more like an aftershock of 2020—a remake or a sequel or some sort of twisted spiritual successor—than its own distinctive year.
Nearly every significant debate in politics and culture, from the woke wars to the streaming wars to the actual wars, can be traced back to that seminal pandemic year, the annus horribilis that tore America, along with much of the rest of the world, apart.
And no movie better captured the anxieties and agitations of that year than Eddington, Ari Aster's manic satire of COVID-era madness and the damage it did to our national psyche. I saw dozens of new films in 2025, but this is the one I thought about most, because it's the first Hollywood film, and maybe the first........