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    ‘Mountainhead’ Review: While We Go Down, They Bro Down

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    The creator of “Succession” skewers tech billionaires in a dark comedy that is intelligent but feels a bit artificial.Over four seasons of “Succession,” the creator, Jesse Armstrong, told the story of people who control the world by selling ideas: the Roy family, who ran and fought over a media and entertainment empire. Toward its end, as their business was sold to a tech entrepreneur, “Succession” suggested that power was shifting, and that the future belonged to silicon hyperbillionaires.In his film “Mountainhead,” which premieres Saturday on HBO, that future has arrived, and it is both terrifying and ridiculous — not unlike our present. In the scabrous story of a weekend getaway for four tech-mogul frenemies, Armstrong finds that our new bro overlords are rich targets for satire, though when it comes to depth, nuance and insight, their story has nothing on the Roys’.As “Mountainhead” begins, countries around the globe are erupting in hatred and sectarian violence, fueled by A.I.-generated propaganda. This chaos is the whoopsie of Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a chuckleheaded social-media entrepreneur whose company pushed a half-baked software update that gave bad actors around the world the sudden ability to create unfalsifiable deepfake videos. (The name “Venis,” a seeming portmanteau of “venal” and “penis” that is pronounced “Venice,” is Armstrong’s sensibility in five letters.)The world is burning. But in the snowy, Randian-named retreat that gives its name to “Mountainhead,” Venis has arrived to chill with his boys. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed possibly the only A.I. capable of weeding out the dangerous fake videos from Venis’s company. Randall (Steve Carell), a self-styled philosopher-exec, tosses around terms like “Hegelian” in a way that makes you wonder if he’s ever finished a book. And Hugo Van Yalk (a wonderfully debased Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the property, is a meditation-app developer nicknamed “Soup” — for “soup kitchen” — because his net worth is a mere half billion dollars.The edgy bro-down that ensues is fueled by unspoken rivalries and schemes. Venis wants Jeff to sell him his A.I., which would allow him to call off the apocalypse without having to do an embarrassing recall of the update. Randall, who has received a concerning diagnosis, is keen on Venis’s plan to usher in the “transhuman” era by uploading people’s consciousnesses to the cloud. Soup wants someone to fund his anemic wellness app and finally add a zero to his humiliating nine-digit wealth.The film centers almost entirely on this quartet. (Like the Roys, they mash up aspects of several real-life analogues — Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and more.) The narrow focus matches their perspective: The four men see themselves as the only real people in the world, while the other eight billion of us are NPCs. At one point, Venis asks Randall, “Do you believe in other people?” The only reasonable answer is, “Obviously not!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Between the Temples’ Review: A Widower Walks Into a Bar

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      And meets his former music teacher, upending his life, in Nathan Silver’s touching comedy, starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane.Ben Gottlieb — the touchingly soulful hero of the soulful, delightfully tetchy “Between the Temples” — is a mess. He needs a haircut and a shave; he could do with better-fitting clothes. He’s having problems at work. He also lives in his family’s basement, that much-derided refuge of the eternal man-child and terminal loser. Yet because the filmmaker Nathan Silver has an appreciation for life’s ironies and likes putting a topspin on his comedy, Ben lives with both his mother and stepmother. He lives, in other words, in his mothers’ basement.Ben — a perfect Jason Schwartzman — is a sad sack, but he’s also just sad and for a very good, excruciating reason, too. His wife died not long ago, leaving him bereft and, increasingly, without an evident sense of self or purpose. He seems to have lost his bearings, but he’s also lost his singing voice, which proves a problem given that he’s the cantor at a local synagogue. He still teaches there, working out of a cramped, shambolic classroom in which he helps boys and girls prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies that formally announce the passage from childhood to adulthood.Set in the present in an upstate New York hamlet, this coming-of-middle-age story follows Ben during an eventful time in his life, which takes a turn after he runs into his former elementary-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, divine). They reconnect in a bar, where she helps the soused, deflated Ben, a kindness that takes an unexpected turn when she shows up at the synagogue. Carla wants to take his class, explaining that she never had a bat mitzvah. Ben is reluctant because, well, she isn’t a child, but after consulting with his boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben relents. A friendship blossoms and perhaps something deeper does, too, and the movie gets its blissfully offbeat groove on.Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, introduces Ben without preamble, immediately dropping you into a conversation that started before the movie did. Ben and his mothers, Meira and Judith (the nicely synced Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), are in the family’s dining room having an apparently serious heart-to-heart. Judith says they think he “needs to start seeing a doctor,” a suggestion that Ben says he’s open to. As the camera zooms out, Ben keeps talking only to be cut off by the doorbell. The moms jump up, and a pretty female doctor enters and almost immediately begins hitting on Ben, a shift that abruptly gives new meaning to the advice the moms have just voiced.With the doctor’s entrance, the movie turns straightaway from the plaintive to the humorous. The scene is characteristic of how Silver changes up the tone and mood, creating an unexpected pacing that’s complemented by Sean Price Williams’s agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary’s editing. The movie is laced with absurd setups, slapstick and some silly props, all of which converge in a scene at a restaurant called the Chained Duck (the name of a satirical French newspaper). There, Ben and Carla have dinner with her belligerent son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a hostility that Silver slyly deflates when the waiter hands everyone menus as large as battleground shields.The outlandish menus undercut the son’s disproportionate, clenched-jaw anger at Carla without draining the scene of its tense realism or turning the son into the butt of the joke. Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Premieres in Cannes

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      At the film’s Cannes premiere, the director’s customary cast, themes and even camera moves were all on display — well, except one.Wes Anderson’s directorial style is so distinctive and particular — so Wessy — that it’s spawned no end of recent A.I. parodies. But how do those imitations compare with the real thing?Many of Anderson’s signature obsessions are on display in his new movie, “Asteroid City,” a ’50s-set comedy about different sets of parents accompanying their space-obsessed kids to a convention in the desert, where they all must quarantine together after receiving an unexpected visitor from the skies. (Strained family dynamics, nerdy children and whimsical settings … check, check, check!)Critics appeared split on the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Tuesday: though “Asteroid City” got glowing notices in The Telegraph and IndieWire, Variety deemed it “for Anderson die-hards only.” That suggests this is his Wessiest movie yet, a case that could certainly be made when you consider the following:It’s filled with his favorite actors.The expansive cast includes several Anderson regulars, including Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer and Tilda Swinton as a kooky astronomer, plus Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Tony Revolori. Scarlett Johansson, previously called on to do a voice in Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs,” gets her first live-action role for the director as a self-absorbed actress who finds herself quarantined next door to Schwartzman. Only two Anderson veterans are missing: Bill Murray, who was originally cast in “Asteroid City” but reportedly had to drop out because of Covid-19, and Owen Wilson.There are big stars in small roles.Actors clamor to star in Anderson’s films, and he takes full advantage: Even the tiniest supporting roles are typically filled with heavy hitters (as in “The French Dispatch,” where Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss is essentially a featured extra). “Asteroid City” welcomes A-lister Tom Hanks into the fold as Schwartzman’s father-in-law, though he’s not as significant a presence as you might expect. Still, at least he’s got more to do than “Barbie” star Margot Robbie and recent Oscar nominee Hong Chau, who each pop in for the briefest of cameos. In future Anderson films, maybe they’ll be upgraded to the main ensemble.It’s got a complicated framing device.Anderson’s films often call attention to their own storytelling by nesting the narrative within another narrative: Perhaps it’s all taking place in a book, or the vignettes are stories in a magazine. In “Asteroid City,” the director indulges in his most complicated construction yet: We’re meant to be watching a TV broadcast (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that dramatizes the story of a playwright (Norton) who wrote an unproduced stage production called “Asteroid City.” Those framing segments are shot in black and white. It’s only when we leap into the idea of his play that Anderson transports us to the gorgeous teals and burnt oranges of the desert, where most of this story within a story (within a story!) unfolds.It all takes place on rigid lines.Though Anderson has become less fixated on placing his actors in the smack-dab middle of the frame, he still blocks his camera movements and choreography in “Asteroid City” so that everything and everybody moves on an x or y axis at all times. (If you want to sneak up on someone in a Wes Anderson movie, do it diagonally. They’d never think to look!)There are deadpan expressions of grief.Schwartzman’s war photographer has something he’s meaning to tell his children: Their mother has died. Or, more specifically, their mother died three weeks ago and he just hasn’t found the right moment to bring it up. The situation is outrageous, but Schwartzman’s performance is classic Wes deadpan, and though most of the cast members give the same steady line readings, that house style is at its best when you can sense real, troubled currents underneath a placid exterior.But it could have been even Wessier …If, after reading all this, you think “Asteroid City” couldn’t get more Wessy … well, it could! At the film’s Cannes news conference on Wednesday, the actor Steve Park said that before shooting began, Anderson created a feature-length, animated storyboard, or animatic, in which he did all the voices himself. “Release the animatics,” Jeffrey Wright intoned solemnly.… especially if it used slow-motion.Later in the news conference, a reporter confronted Anderson about one trademark that’s disappeared: Though he used to use slow-motion sequences fairly often — think Gwyneth Paltrow dramatically exiting her bus in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — recent films like “Asteroid City” have all but dropped the device. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and I don’t know if I’m in command of them — it’s part of my personality,” Anderson said, before growing concerned. “That’s one of the tools that I’ve used often, and I should look for some spots for that,” he promised the reporter. “I’ll take the note. And I’ll do it!” More