The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron Howard, a director whose cinematic disposition can be sunny to the point of sanitization. In a more literal sense, though, the film might be understood as only the latest of his departures to distant places and times. In dramatizing a series of mysterious disappearances that occurred nearly a century ago on an inhospitable island in the Galápagos archipelago, Howard has given us another journey into fact-based, far-flung peril—a picture to file alongside his earlier “Apollo 13” (1995), “ In the Heart of the Sea ” (2015), and “Thirteen Lives” (2022). Dare we add to the list the much-maligned “ Hillbilly Elegy ” (2020), which built a different kind of

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