If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that this country ain’t what it used to be. Either it’s a tainted corruption of once-hallowed ideals like capitalism and Christianity, or it’s a shocking betrayal of nearly 250 years of gradual, imperfect progress toward a fully realized embodiment of its founding ideals. It’s an incredibly confusing time to be paying attention, and it’s hard to blame at least some of those folks who’ve fallen under the spell of a cultish faux-populist leader and the deranged informational bubble that right-wing oligarchs have created. After all, it’s very good propaganda. And it seems, without going too far into the psychology of conspiracy theorists, to offer a much more appealing narrative than the more verifiable sources offer.

That said, the antagonists of two new films, each a particular brand of conservative extremist, are as dangerous as they are pitiable. The one you’re more likely to have heard of is Sheriff Joe Cross in Eddington, the latest provocation from writer-director Ari Aster. Aster’s last film, Beau Is Afraid, was an audacious anxiety assault set in a nightmarish hellscape. Eddington is set in May 2020 in the titular New Mexico town, as COVID’s first brutal wave, and the government’s efforts to combat it, led to the public metastasis of rancor that had been, in America at least, generally benign up to that point. In other words, a nightmarish hellscape that hits even closer to home.

Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, enunciating as well as he ever does) disdains the state’s mask mandate as an infringement on his personal freedom, while Eddington’s mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), in the middle of an unopposed reelection campaign, is on the other side. Cross jumps in the race and before you know it, he’s parading around town in his police cruiser emblazoned with enough batshit, poorly punctuated, red, white, and blue slogans to make Hal Phillip Walker green with envy. Meanwhile, Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone), who makes impressively creepy dolls, falls increasingly under the spell of an Internet huckster (Austin Butler, giving the movie’s best performance), as Louise’s mother (Deirdre O’Connell), staying with them during lockdown, fuels her manias and generally gets on his nerves.

As if all that weren’t enough, the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, inspires a small group of young Eddingtonians to begin holding Black Lives Matter protests, blocking streets and flouting the authority of Cross and his two deputies, Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Micheal Ward). As racial justice joins COVID measures on the menu of controversies, the dynamic between Michael, one of Eddington’s few Black residents, and his colleagues gets more complicated. Mayor Ted, as he’s known, has his own concerns. In addition to owning Eddington’s primary watering hole, he’s an investor in a company that aims to bring a giant, water-sucking data center to the isolated desert hamlet. And his teenaged son (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who he’s raising alone, has been violating curfew and hanging out with the town’s newly minted activists.

Of course, violence eventually erupts, and Eddington shifts gears from being a confused political satire to a noir-tinged neo-Western. It’s only during these third-act developments that one of the few truly sympathetic characters, a Pueblo tribal sheriff with the wonderful name of Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau), happens onto the scene, only to have his jurisdiction, not to mention his legitimacy, unrecognized by local law enforcement. By this point it’s clear that Aster’s goal of recapturing that fraught and seemingly pivotal American moment while preserving empathy for characters on both sides of the increasingly solid political line is, perhaps, unattainable.

In a way, Eddington feels both “too soon” in its efforts to wring dark comedy out of a very recent and very traumatic national experience and oddly passe in its depiction of the way that experience laid bare the fault lines in our civic landscape that we will be attempting to repair for decades, if we’re lucky. It has often been the province of those on the left end of the political spectrum to be more forgiving of brainwashed conservative extremists than vice versa. Perhaps one sign of how frayed things are is the degree to which that feels like a copout here. Aster’s an absurdist, and these are absurd times, but at this point we need something more than just a shrugging recognition of that fact. We need answers, and he’s got none. (Wide release)

Another radicalized victim of misinformation is Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman), a self-identified “sovereign citizen” who travels the country with his teenaged son Joe (Jacob Tremblay) holding seminars on bizarre pseudo-legal theories that justify a refusal to submit to governmental power. These are the folks who refuse to get Social Security numbers and drivers’ licenses, and who spout gibberish about the illegitimacy of currency and “affidavits of truth.” (Don’t go down that Internet rabbit hole, trust me…) Writer-director Christian Swegal’s debut feature Sovereign is based on the true story of the Kanes, and the film shows that, like so many of his ilk, Jerry Kane became susceptible to these fictions following personal and financial difficulties, including the death of a newborn child and the loss of his job.

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Swegal tells the Kanes’ story with an emphasis on Joe’s perspective. He’s been homeschooled in this philosophy and enthusiastically helps with his dad’s rather ramshackle presentations, often in a matching suit. But he’s also frustrated by the consequences, which include the foreclosure of their home after Jerry refuses to pay what he considers an unenforceable mortgage contract. As father and son pile up run-ins with the law, the local police chief (Dennis Quaid, whose brother Randy has become a proponent of various conspiracy theories) takes a greater interest. The chief and his son, who serves on the force, form an obvious counterpoint to the Kanes that foreshadows the film’s tragic finale.

Offerman, an outspoken progressive who became famous as libertarian Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, has played a number of conservative-coded characters recently, including in Alex Garland’s Civil War and the latest Mission: Impossible film. While his performance here humanizes Kane, it also can’t help but feel like a form of payback for his cuddly normalization of Swanson’s anti-government stances. It’s too easy, though, to describe Jerry Kane as some sort of “dark Ron Swanson.” It’s also a discredit to the textured performance he delivers as a man so desperate for some confirmation of his victimhood, some explanation for how it all went wrong, that he heads down a path which, you can see deep in his eyes, he knows is a dead end. (Available to rent or own on major platforms)

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: The actor Embeth Davidtz, who first gained wide notice in Schindler’s List, was raised in South Africa from age eight onward. That experience strongly informs her directing debut, an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s acclaimed 2002 memoir about growing up in a family of desperate British expat tenant farmers caught up in the 1980 Bush War in Rhodesia and the election of Robert Mugabe as the country’s leader. These events precipitated widespread seizures of White-owned farmland by the government and the renaming of the nation as Zimbabwe. It’s rather a touchy topic to bring into cultural discourse in the context of the current Republican administration’s recent lies about the South African government’s supposed genocide of White farmers, but Davidtz smartly keeps the focus on seven-year-old Bobo Fuller, daughter to Nicola (Davidtz) and Tim (Rob Van Vuuren). There’s an Empire of the Sun vibe to things, as the precocious Bobo (marvelously played by eight-year-old Lexi Venter), firm in her instilled belief that most Black Africans are terrorists, observes the growing chaos with the innocence and resilience of childhood. She has a friendly relationship with the family’s Black maid Sarah (Zikhona Bali), but Sarah (in one of the few non-Bobo-privileged moments) worries that her association with the semi-feral White girl will make her a target of Black nationalist forces. Besides eliciting an utterly natural performance from her juvenile lead, Davidtz and cinematographer Willie Nel conjure a convincingly dusty, bedraggled landscape, one worlds away from the vast plantations that had propped up White minority rule even after the British colony’s Declaration of Independence in 1965. As the family’s situation worsens, Nicola suffers increasingly from alcohol abuse and episodes of emotional instability, while Bobo’s older sister Vanessa (Anina Hope Reed) endures the unwanted attention of a slovenly family friend. The real winner in all this? Robert Mugabe, of course, who ruled Zimbabwe as Prime Minister or President from 1980 to 2017 and presided over a kleptocratic, oppressive, and incompetent regime. (Regal Fox Tower)

To a Land Unknown: Yet another film about characters whose lives are upended by political turmoil, this gripping debut feature from Mahdi Fleifel centers on Reda (Aram Sabbah) and Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri), two Palestinian cousins who have made their undocumented way from a Lebanese refugee camp to Athens, where they have resorted to petty crime and prostitution to raise money for fake passports to Germany. The pair, whose relationship recalls Midnight Cowboy and Mean Streets in Chatila’s sense of responsibility for his more dysfunctional cousin, befriends a 13-year-old fellow refugee, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who says he has a wealthy aunt in Italy prepared to pay for his delivery—just not up front. The local human smuggler (Munther Rayahneh) doesn’t work that way, so Reda and Chatila convince a local barfly, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), who has a thing for Chatila, to pose as the boy’s mother and use fake documents to travel there with Malik. Their scheme, like all such schemes in film history, does not go off as planned. Fleifel, the director of several documentaries about the Palestinian experience and a refugee himself who grew up in Denmark, captures the constant tension of the situation and makes effective use of locations. The leads are game, if occasionally stiff, and the story is, sadly, an eternal one. (Living Room Theaters)

VOD/streaming

Hot Spring Shark Attack: Sometimes you just need to get away from it all with an extremely goofy movie about a prehistoric shark that comes back to life and begins chomping on patrons at a popular Japanese hot springs resort, or onsen. The mayor, eager to pursue his planned, 3D-printed additions to the resort, wants to play down the increasing body count of guests who disappear only to show up as corpses with dinosaur shark teeth embedded in them. (The DNA of Jaws runs strong in this genre.) The inept police chief isn’t much help either, leaving it up to an intrepid female marine biologist and an enigmatic, muscle-bound fellow who might be some sort of mythical ocean guardian to stem the bloody tide. This lo-fi, lo-res, lo-budget spectacle of terrible CGI effects, cartoonish gore, and declamatory performances is part of the “so bad they’re fun” genre that includes Birdemic, Sharknado, and far too many others, all of which descend from the Tommy Wiseau/Neil Breen credo that there’s no such thing as bad press. (And of course its English title owes a debt to Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s galling when a filmmaker, in this case first-time director Morihito Inoue, sets out to make a sloppily crafted work, but there’s enough self-conscious silliness here to blunt that sensation a bit. (Available to rent or buy through major platforms.)

Also opening

I Know What You Did Last Summer: A group of friends are terrorized by a stalker who knows about a gruesome incident from their past. Yes, Jennifer Love Hewitt is confirmed to appear in this reboot/sequel of the 1997 teen slasher. (wide release)

Smurfs: When Papa Smurf (John Goodman) is taken by evil wizards Razamel and Gargamel (both JP Karliak), Smurfette (Rihanna) leads the Smurfs (James Corden, Nick Offerman, Sandra Oh, Alex Winter, and so many more) on a mission to the real world to save him. (wide release)

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The Way, My Way: Based on the best-selling Camino memoir by Bill Bennett, this docudrama follows one man’s journey along the Camino de Santiago, searching for meaning, not realizing it was right in front of him, one step at a time. (Salem Cinema)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse: This 1991 documentary, incorporating Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes footage, chronicles how Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) was plagued by extraordinary script, shooting, budget, and casting problems, nearly destroying the life and career of the celebrated director. Limited run of a new 4K restoration. (Cinema 21)

Also this week

Year of the Fox: A teenage girl navigates privilege and predation in 1990s Aspen, where power corrupts, innocence is currency, and survival means learning which rules to follow and which to leave behind. (Tomorrow Theater, 7/18, director Megan Griffiths and producer Lacey Leavitt Gray in attendance)

www.RachelOrmont.com: An unflinching psychedelic techno-satire about a woman who unknowingly grows up in captivity working for an advertising agency, starring Betsey Brown (Assholes, The Sweet East), Dasha Nekrasova (Succession, The Beast, Materialists), and Chloe Cherry (Euphoria). Due to its sexually graphic content, this screening is 21+ only. (Clinton Street Theater, 7/21)

Repertory

Friday 7/18

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Clinton Street Theater)
• In the Mood for Love (Cinema 21, through 7/24)
• Kung Fu Hustle [2005] (Cinema 21, also 7/19)
• The Neverending Story [1984] (Academy Theater, through 7/24)
• Prince of Darkness [1987] (Cinemagic)
• Sorcerer [1977] (Academy Theater, through 7/24)
• Total Recall [1990] (Academy Theater, through 7/24)

Saturday 7/19

• The Asphalt Jungle [1950] (Cinema 21)
• Assault on Precinct 13 [1976] (Cinemagic, also 7/20 & 7/24)
• Certain Women [2016] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Days of Heaven [1978] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm)
• Heat [1995] (Cinemagic, also 7/23)
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Clinton Street Theater, also 7/20)
• Maniac [1980] / Vigilante [1982] (Hollywood Theatre, director William Lustig in attendance)
• Margaret [2011] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Matilda [1996] (Hollywood Theatre)

Sunday 7/20

• Heathers [1986] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Never Been Kissed [1999] (Tomorrow Theater)
• The Outsiders: The Complete Novel (Salem Cinema)
• Shutter Island [2010] (Cinemagic, through 7/23)

Monday 7/21

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil [1997] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Raging Bull [1980] (Cinemagic, also 7/22 & 7/24)

Tuesday 7/22

• The Bad News Bears [1976] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm)
• Gamera: Guardian of the Universe [1995] (Clinton Street Theater, with actress Ayako Fujitani in attendance)

Wednesday 7/23

• The American Astronaut [2001] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm, also 8/2)
• To the Stars by Hard Ways [1981] (Clinton Street Theater)

Thursday 7/24

• Trouble in Paradise [1932] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm)