I Know What You Did Last Summer” slashed its way to $2.2 million in Thursday previews, while A24’s “Eddington,” a satire set during the height of the pandemic, picked up $625,000. Paramount’s “Smurfs,

You might need to lie down for a bit after “Eddington.” Preferably in a dark room with no screens and no talking. “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s latest nightmare vision, is sure to divide (along which lines,

Located in a fictional small town in New Mexico, the film centers around the lives of the townspeople during the thick of the pandemic. At the epicenter of it all is the budding rivalry between two of the town’s most prominent leaders: Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal),

Travis Hopsin of Punch Drunk Critics says the fear surrounding the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests that’s depicted in Eddington is “designed to enrage us,” but the most terrifying part of Ari Aster’s film is how accurate it is. The critic says:

A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.

Writer-director Ari Aster's fiendishly funny film stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as a sheriff and mayor on politically opposing sides in a well-off community during the summer of 2020. "'Eddington' has something to offend (or annoy) just about everybody,

Ari Aster, the man behind some of Hollywood’s most unsettling films, takes his own anxiety and puts it onscreen.

"Eddington," co-starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes and Micheal Ward, opens in theaters nationwide Friday, July 18.