Film reviews: Eddington and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Eddington

Directed by Ari Aster (R)

★★

Ari Aster's new film is "really going to divide and aggravate people," said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. "It's designed to be divisive," and "if you hate it, it's kind of done its job." Set in a New Mexico town at the start of the Covid pandemic, Eddington pits a mask-hating sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix against a nominally progressive mayor played by Pedro Pascal, and while the story touches on conspiracy theories, viral culture, the George Floyd protests, and "everything we raged about" in 2020, all of it adds up to a "deliberately hollow provocation" that tells us we'll never understand how things got so ugly.

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You've heard of movies that offer escape from the stresses of the world, said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. "Eddington is very much the opposite of that." It's "not incompetently done or unwatchable," but it "just doesn't feel like a whole of anything other than a cinematic expression of broken brains," one that culminates in an explosion of gun violence. Coming five years after America did come apart, it "somehow seems both too late and too soon," and "feels like the last thing any of us need." But after the "broad-swipe" satire of the film's first half, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar throws us into full nightmare territory again, creating a film that "chills you, unnerves you, and makes you want to crawl out of your skin." It's another Aster movie that does what it aims to do. "You just wish this one didn't feel so close to being nonfiction."

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Directed by Embeth Davidtz (R)

★★★

Even if you despise its adult protagonists, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is an enthralling watch," said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Like the best-selling 2001 memoir it's based on, the film offers a child's-eye view of being brought up by prejudiced white settler parents during the war for independence that created Zimbabwe, and the movie's wild-haired young star, Lexi Venter, "belongs in the pantheon of filmland's savage moppets." Venter plays the author, nicknamed Bobo, at 8, and Dogs presents Bobo and her teen sister "the way kids actually are: self-centered, often dishonest, inclined to brattiness," said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Bobo has been taught to fear that Black guerrillas could slaughter her in her sleep, and the movie "simply plants us without judgment in this startling lifestyle."

Writer-director Embeth Davidtz, who also plays Bobo's alcoholic mother, spent some of her own childhood in apartheid South Africa, and she proves "ideally suited to the story," handling it with a sensitivity that "doesn't lapse into sentimentality." Bobo eventually questions her learned bigotry, said Robert Daniels in Screen Daily, but because Davidtz's film is locked in a child's perspective, the Black characters remain fairly one-dimensional. And as brave as the film may be, the storytelling strategy "presents Davidtz with a tricky question to answer: Why should we care about the perspective of a bigoted white girl?"