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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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      in Theater

      ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Remembers When TV Had a Conscience, and a Spine

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      A TV critic looks at George Clooney’s play about CBS News standing up to political pressure, even as its current ownership might succumb to it.In the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow (George Clooney) allows himself a moment of doubt, as his program “See It Now” embarks on a series of reports on the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.“It occurs to me,” he says, “that we might not get away with this one.”It is a small but important line. We know Murrow’s story — exposing the red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy — as history. And history, once set down on the page and stage, can seem inevitable.But Murrow’s success was not preordained. It required hard, exacting work. It required guts. It required journalists to risk personal ruin and some of them to experience it.It’s a point worth remembering. And it hits especially hard at this moment, when CBS News, headquartered just blocks away from the Winter Garden Theater, is again under political and financial pressure to rein in its coverage of the powerful. History is repeating, this time perhaps as tragedy. (CNN is airing the play’s June 7 evening performance live, as if to give the news business a shot in the arm.)In “Good Night, and Good Luck,” adapted from the 2005 screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslov, all ends well, more or less. (The “less” is implied in the stage production by a “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-like closing montage that ties the division and chaos of the past several decades to the cacophony of media.)Murrow ultimately received support — however nervous and limited — from his network. Its chief, William S. Paley (Paul Gross), fretted about pressure from politicians and from the “See It Now” sponsor, the aluminum company Alcoa. But while Paley complained about the agita Murrow brought him, he did not pull the plug on the McCarthy investigation.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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      in Movies

      When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once

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      The 1983 ABC movie “The Day After” was a landmark moment that proved contentious even before it aired, as a new documentary shows.In 1980, the year the new documentary “Television Event” (in theaters) opens, researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans believed there would be nuclear war in the next 10 years. Schoolchildren participated in evacuation drills. There were enough nuclear weapons in America and the Soviet Union to wipe out the world’s population many times over. And yet, as participants in the film repeatedly point out, for the most part people couldn’t bear to think about it. We find it hard to live with our own imminent destruction and also remember to take out the trash regularly.That knowledge, though, gave rise to “The Day After,” the controversial TV movie that aired on ABC in 1983 and was watched by more than 100 million people, about 67 percent of the American viewing public that evening. The film, shot in Lawrence, Kan., depicts the very real-feeling aftermath of a nuclear attack.The production and release were fraught. Some executives felt that TV wasn’t the place to scare people; there was a lot of strife behind the scenes. To tell the story of “The Day After,” the director, Jeff Daniels, weaves together copious behind-the-scenes production footage with contemporary interviews. The “Day After” director, Nicholas Meyer, still seems a little scarred by the experience. Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Pictures, talks about conceiving the idea for a movie that “has meaning, that has import.” The more skeptical, practical Stu Samuels, then vice president of ABC Motion Pictures, speaks at length about the many challenges of getting this kind of movie shot and on the air, including run-ins with the network’s standards department. Edward Hume, who wrote “The Day After,” and Stephanie Austin, an associate producer, talk about the film, as does Ellen Anthony, who lived in Lawrence and played the youthful Joleen, a girl who must live in an underground bunker with her family.“Television Event” makes a very compelling case that “The Day After” was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, even if it was made for the small screen. There were plenty of difficulties, both on the ground and in the edit room; there was network skepticism and even, eventually, some disapproval by the federal government. One flaw in documentaries of this sort can be a chorus of interviewees who all echo one another and seem basically in agreement, but that is not the case here: The subjects of “Television Event” often express skepticism or outright animosity toward one another, giving different versions of events and opinions about the process. That not only makes it a fascinating glimpse into this production, but reminds the audience how tricky it is to get anything made, let alone a movie like “The Day After.”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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      in Movies

      The Best True Crime to Stream: Dramatizations That Deliver

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      Across television, film and podcast, here are four picks that successfully give well-known true-crime stories the scripted treatment.Not long ago, comically bad re-enactments were the cornerstone of true-crime movies and TV shows. Despite their cheesiness, these staged scenes served a purpose: to bring scenarios to life, of course, but also to offer some relief from talking-head interviews and still shots of photographs and documents.But in the last decade or so, the number of true-crime stories that have received scripted treatment, often casting A-list actors, has exploded. It’s a phenomenon due in part to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series “American Crime Story” — which debuted in 2016 and has taken on the O.J. Simpson saga and the assassination of Gianni Versace — and more recently “Monster.”Coming this summer is a Paramount+ mini-series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was found strangled to death in her family’s Colorado home in 1996. It will star Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen as JonBenet’s parents. And over at Hulu, a scripted series about the Murdaugh family murders is being developed. Like their predecessors, these series will most likely aim to hew closely to their stranger-than-fiction origins while giving the creators artistic license in how the cases are brought to life onscreen.Ahead of those, check out these four offerings that give such stories the dramatized treatment to great effect.Mini-Series“The Staircase”Few true-crime stories have held my attention over the years as this one about Michael Peterson, a North Carolina novelist and aspiring politician who was charged with the death of his wife, the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson. She was found crumpled and bleeding at the base of the staircase in their upscale Durham home in 2001.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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      in Television

      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3 Premiere Recap: Outlook Good

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      The new season opener found most of the women prioritizing their men’s needs over their own. That didn’t seem likely to last.My jaw is bruised from hitting the floor when Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) tells her gal pals that her boyfriend, Aidan (John Corbett), asked for “no communication” while he deals with family issues — and that she is just fine with giving it to him. No communication. For five full years. And this is supposed to be love?Let’s review how we got here. At the end of Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the on-again lovers Carrie and Aidan found themselves at an impasse when Aidan’s son, Wyatt, hit hard times. Wyatt needed paternal supervision — so much so, apparently, that Aidan felt compelled to devote himself to it entirely back home in Virginia. The Gramercy palace Carrie had just purchased for the two of them became a reluctant bachelorette pad, and their love was relegated to a long-distance situationship.At that point, we knew Carrie and Aidan were going to hold onto their love connection but weren’t going to visit each other — as implausible as that seemed alone. What was less apparent until the first few moments of Season 3 was that they weren’t going to speak, period. No texting, no FaceTime, not even the occasional Instagram like. The only hellos they’re exchanging are blank postcards, which they’re each sending back and forth between Virginia and New York, and for Carrie, this is apparently enough. Right.This no-contact-but-stay-together setup was never realistic — even if we suspended every possible disbelief. It is even more absurd that Carrie plays along.It doesn’t take long for Aidan to break his own rule, though. All he needed were three beers and a good, old-fashioned “ache.” He buzz-dials Carrie out of nowhere and lures her into one-sided, rather frantic phone sex. (Carrie may have been more enthusiastic if not for the beady eyes of her kitty-cat, Shoe, who was watching from the edge of the bed. But between that, Aidan’s intoxicated grunts, and a disruptive horn-blare, she just couldn’t quite get there.)Not long after, Carrie calls up Aidan for Round 2, but the time is no good for Aidan. He is back on Wyatt patrol, lying in bed beside his sleeping son. Carrie hangs up in shame.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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      in Television

      ‘Malditos’ Is a Brooding, Operatic French Drama

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      Set amid a traveler community in southern France, the Max series is a fresh and surprising story about family, superstition and a legacy of violence.The French drama “Malditos” (in French, with subtitles, or dubbed), on Max, is set within a traveler community whose members are about to be displaced from the dilapidated carnival fairgrounds where they live and work. The show hits brutal, operatic highs, with its deadly scheming playing out against the dramatic landscape of Camargue, in southern France. Give us blinding fraternal strife, and give it to us on a sun-bleached salt flat.Sara (Céline Sallette), who instead of a crown and a scepter has a scowl and a cigarette, is determined to keep the clan together. But everyone around her has different ideas about how to scrounge up enough money — and enough mutual will — to do so.Especially her sons. The brash, excitable son, Tony (Darren Muselet), wants to get into the lucrative drug market — or maybe he wants to run away with his girlfriend, who is from a rival clan. The brooding, bitter son, Jo (Pablo Cobo), who was forced to abandon his career ambitions, has his own vision for leadership, one he honed during years of estrangement from his mother and brother. Sara, Tony and Jo all think they are keeping the same secret, but they aren’t quite.The show wears its Shakespearean power-jockeying as comfortably as its track jackets. “You’re a real prince,” a vulnerable man stutters at Jo, begging for his life. Every bright idea just illuminates the path toward a more severe catastrophe, and pretty soon, the bodies are piling up. Some are even being exhumed.Violence abounds, both in harebrained shoot-em-ups and in the startling volatility of a bull. One person might be leveled by a mob-led beat-down or by the punishing rains of an unrelenting storm. Another might be swallowed up by oppressive gender roles or spit out by expensive real estate regulations.A few of the twists and turns here can feel a little predictable, and all that glowering starts losing its impact after a while. But the show has plenty of fresh ideas and true surprises in its specifics and realism, in its characters’ rites and traditions. “Malditos” teases out how religion, superstition and harshly enforced cultural customs are both the fabric and the rend. There’s a bright beauty to a tough-guy dad tenderly officiating a poetic marriage ritual, and also a cold horror at the bride’s numb concessions and deep despair.Four episodes are available now, and the remaining three arrive on Fridays. More

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      in Television

      ‘Dept. Q’ Review: Netflix’s Nordic-British-American Noir

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      Matthew Goode plays a traumatized Edinburgh detective in a complicated cold-case series that’s less than the sum of its influences.“Dept. Q,” this week’s new cop show on Netflix, is a study in internationalism. Largely written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, it is based on a novel by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen and set and filmed in Scotland with a British cast led by Matthew Goode.That might stand out given the current trans-Atlantic vibe, but of course the show, which premieres Thursday, has been in the works for years. And if anyone is going to remain committed to peaceful relationships across multiple markets, it will be Netflix.The ambitious, nine-episode season also reflects the history of Frank, a talented writer and director who has had his highs (“Out of Sight,” “The Queen’s Gambit”) and his lows (“Monsieur Spade”). He likes to roam among genres, with a home base in literary American crime (“Out of Sight,” “Hoke,” “A Walk Among the Tombstones”) but forays into the western (“Godless”), science fiction (“Minority Report”), period melodrama (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and others.For “Dept. Q,” in which Goode plays a damaged Edinburgh detective tasked with assembling a new cold-case unit, Frank (who developed the show with the British writer Chandni Lakhani) gets to play mix-and-match in one place. The influence of Nordic noir on the traditional British mystery has been established for several decades now, but Frank adds some American flavor to the cocktail.The buddy-cop pairing of Goode’s Carl Morck and Alexej Manvelov’s Akram Salim, a Syrian immigrant with an unsettling knack for extracting confessions, is probably more richly drawn than it would be otherwise; the interplay of Goode and Manvelov is one of the show’s main pleasures. And as is usually the case in Frank’s productions, “Dept. Q” has an overall flow and fluency — a style that is, if not always seductive, consistently engaging.(A 2013 Danish film based on the same source, “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” is dour by comparison, though some might find its 96-minute running time preferable to the seven and a half hours of the series.)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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      in Television

      Mike White, ‘White Lotus’ Creator, Will Return to Cast of ‘Survivor’

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      Mike White, a noted reality-television aficionado, first competed on the show in 2018.Mike White, the acclaimed screenwriter, creator of the hit HBO series “The White Lotus” and reality competition show veteran, will be returning to “Survivor” for its 50th season.The “Survivor” host Jeff Probst announced White’s return on “CBS Mornings” on Wednesday.“In between writing and directing seasons of ‘White Lotus,’ Mike White is back,” Probst said.White first appeared on “Survivor” in 2018, during the show’s 37th season, and lasted on the island for 39 days, finishing in second place. Although “The White Lotus” wouldn’t premiere until three years later (White has said the show, an acerbic anthology series set at an exotic hotel chain, was partly inspired by his observations while on “Survivor”), he was already a well-regarded filmmaker, having written the film “School of Rock” and created the HBO series “Enlightened.”Conceived of and filmed during the Covid pandemic, “The White Lotus” became a breakout hit for HBO and catapulted White to a new level of fame. He won Emmy Awards for both writing and directing in the limited series or anthology categories for the show’s first season. The finale of the third season — which aired this spring and starred Parker Posey, Carrie Coon and Walton Goggins — was watched by more than six million viewers.Before “Survivor,” White competed on “The Amazing Race” with his father in 2009 and again in 2011. In a 2021 interview with The New Yorker, he attributed his love of reality television to its ability to distill real human behavior and conflict.“For me, as a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does,” he said. “To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird” stuff and “capture your attention.”The landmark 50th season of “Survivor,” which is scheduled to air in 2026, will feature several returning cast members, including a Season 1 contestant, Jenna Lewis-Dougherty, and the five-time competitors Cirie Fields and Ozzy Lusth. Filming is scheduled to take place this summer. More