Latest news with #CoryMichaelSmith
Newsweek
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
New on Mubi: Full List of Movies, Shows Hitting the Streaming Platform in June 2025
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors Sixteen new titles to delve into will land on MUBI throughout June 2025, and the streaming service has officially unveiled what they will be. Kicking off with Cory Michael Smith (Saturday Night, May December, Sentimental Value) collaborating with the platform to hand-select a couple of titles to add this month, we see Yen Tan's 1985 and Peter Sattler's Camp X-Ray arrive on June 1. Twin Peaks will arrive on MUBI on June 13, 2025. Twin Peaks will arrive on MUBI on June 13, 2025. MUBI READ: How To Watch the New Jesse Armstrong Film 'Mountainhead' Other highlights from June 1 include a selection of films curated for MUBI's "This is Not a Coming Out Story" season, celebrating visionary queer cinema. Among them are Levan Akin's Crossing, Gregg Araki's The Living End, and Daniel Riberio's The Way He Looks. Later in the month, David Lynch fans are in for a treat because, on June 13, MUBI will add seasons one and two of Twin Peaks to the platform, along with Twin Peaks: The Return. That's not all that arrives on June 13, with Simon Hacker's 2024 film Notice to Quit also gracing our screens. The film stars Michael Zegen as Andy Singer, an out-of-work actor now struggling as a realtor in New York City. When his estranged 10-year-old daughter shows up on his doorstep in the middle of his eviction, his whole world comes crashing down around him. Beyond the select few listed above, there's plenty more heading to MUBI throughout June. You can read everything new on MUBI in June 2025 below. What's New on MUBI in June 2025? June 1 Camp X-Ray , directed by Peter Sattler | Hand-picked by Cory Michael Smith , directed by Peter Sattler | Hand-picked by Cory Michael Smith 1985 , directed by Yen Tan | Hand-picked by Cory Michael Smith , directed by Yen Tan | Hand-picked by Cory Michael Smith Stranger by the Lake , directed by Alain Guiraudie | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Alain Guiraudie | This is Not a Coming Out Story The Way He Looks , directed by Daniel Riberio | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Daniel Riberio | This is Not a Coming Out Story The Living End , directed by Gregg Araki | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Gregg Araki | This is Not a Coming Out Story Totally F***ed Up , directed by Gregg Araki | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Gregg Araki | This is Not a Coming Out Story I Am Divine , directed by Jeffrey Schwarz | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Jeffrey Schwarz | This is Not a Coming Out Story Keep the Lights On , directed by Ira Sachs | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Ira Sachs | This is Not a Coming Out Story Naz + Maalik , directed by Jay Dockendorf | This is Not a Coming Out Story , directed by Jay Dockendorf | This is Not a Coming Out Story Party Girl , directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer , directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer Majorie Prime, directed by Michael Almereyda June 6 Việt and Nam, directed by Minh Quý Trương June 13
New York Times
2 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
This ‘Mountainhead' Star Only Looks Like a Nihilist
Cory Michael Smith was disappointed. 'I'm a big fan of pepperoni with a little more constitution,' he said, looking down at the slice of pizza on his plate. 'These are tired. They're tired cups.' This was the day after the premiere party for 'Mountainhead,' the Jesse Armstrong movie that premieres Saturday on HBO. A Vantablack comedy of wealth, power and moral negligence, it evokes Armstrong's earlier fable of the megarich, 'Succession,' but is more explicitly attuned to current anxieties about Silicon Valley oligarchs. Smith stars as a social media mogul named Venis (rhymes with menace), a pampered edgelord holed up in a cartoonishly swank chalet (the Mountainhead of the title) with other tech machers, played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman and Ramy Youssef. Venis's content creation tools have destabilized much of the global South, but he remains mostly unbothered. 'Nothing means anything, and everything is funny and cool,' he tells his fellow founders, as they swipe past scenes of chaos. In person, Smith, 38, was not quite so nihilistic, though he had dressed the part, a man in black on black on black — pants, coat, shirt, tie, shoes. Offscreen, Smith is abidingly polite, with a wide smile that narrows his eyes to slits. He lives in the West Village, though increasingly work keeps him away. He had flown in for the premiere and soon he would fly out again, to Alaska where he is shooting a film that he was forbidden to discuss. Smith ('Gotham,' 'Carol,' 'May December') is suddenly so in demand that he had to miss Cannes, at which 'Sentimental Value,' a movie in which he co-stars, was awarded the Grand Prix. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Mountainhead' Review: While We Go Down, They Bro Down
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!' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Globe and Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead: Succession's successor sharply satirizes a new class of billionaire
Before he transformed the idea into a hit HBO television series, the British screenwriter Jesse Armstrong first wrote Succession as a film. I've always been curious what kind of movie Armstrong's original screenplay – which landed on the so-called 'Black List' of best unproduced screenplays of 2010 – would have resulted in. Armstrong's new HBO film that premieres in Canada on Saturday night on Crave (8 p.m. ET) may be the closest we'll ever get to seeing what that would have looked like. While not a Succession spin-off per se, Mountainhead certainly seems to exist in an expansion of its universe – where the characters and the satire are both extremely rich. The film begins with a bit of exposition, efficient if not all that elegant, that sets up the background of the story through news footage. Traam, a social media site used by billions around the world, has introduced a new suite of artificial intelligence features. Without any moderation, they have led to bad actors to create real-time deepfakes that have quickly sparked violent and even genocidal conflict all around the globe. Despite this worldwide chaos he's created, Traam's cocky owner Venis (Cory Michael Smith) – the richest man in the world and, from a brief glimpse of his parenting style, at least partly modelled on Elon Musk – is headed off on a weekend retreat with his tech-bro besties. An oversized SUV, private jet and helicopter ride away is a new mountaintop mansion in the Canadian Rockies that has been built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who, with a net worth of merely $500-million, is considered the poorest of his billionaire pals. Indeed, he's nicknamed Soupy, short for Soup Kitchen, for that reason. (Yes, Hugo has named his retreat Mountainhead in an apparently non-ironic homage to objectivist novelist Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.) Also joining on this jaunt are Randall (Steve Carrell), described as a 'Dark Money Gandalf' and unwilling to admit that all the wealth in the world cannot cure the type of cancer he has; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has a modicum of ethics compared to the others and a rival AI platform that quickly could undo all the damage that Traam is doing – but only if Venis names the right price. Full of poetically garbled tech jargon and inventively profane put-downs, Armstrong's screwball dialogue in this film is as enjoyable – and unquotable in this newspaper – as Succession's at its most absurd. His satire is sharpest in the ways he parodies tech-bro libertarian stances. In self-serving denial of the effect of Traam is having, Venis recalls that when the Lumière Brothers showed their first movie of a train, the audience jumped for cover. 'The answer to that was not stop the movies,' he says, with the type of specious argument one normally has to pay big bucks to hear at a Munk Debate. 'The answer was show more movies.' Randall follows up with his own risible reasoning to ignore the suffering of others, delivered in a sarcastic tone: 'There will be eight to 10 cardiac arrests during the Super Bowl. Stop the Super Bowl!' For all its line-by-line dark pleasures, Mountainhead would quickly grow tiring were it not for the fact that Armstrong's plotting of shifting power dynamics among these four is pretty clever as well. Venis has to dance around how to get Jeff's AI without compromising his pride, while Randall goes deeper and deeper into dangerous delusion as he imagines that perhaps Traam's 'creative destruction' might speed up the eventuality of transhumanism and the ability for his consciousness to be uploaded to the mainframe. Then, there's insecure Hugo who will go along with any plan as long as someone invests in his meditation app that he hopes might finally push him over a billion in net worth. There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of Mountainhead, as there was in Succession, between how much the audience hates these characters and also enjoys spending time laughing at (with?) them – and how to balance the fact that the ultra-rich are beyond the reach of consequences, while satisfying the desire to punish them. Unable to really have his characters develop or truly grapple with the implications of their actions without humanizing them, Armstrong returns to his old underwhelming stand-by – scenes in which his monsters stare into the distance miserably, or look at themselves in the mirror as if try to the find shreds of humanity behind their mask. Ultimately, with so much of Mountainhead's action taking place in a single location, you see how Armstrong's style of writing is suited for a TV screen over a big one – and why it's for the best Succession didn't happen as a movie. Indeed, you could even see Mountainhead dropped on a stage, with minimal edits to the script. Finally, male actors who wanted to explore the depths of toxic masculinity and American capitalism would have a more up-to-date work than David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (incidentally, now on in New York starring Kieran Culkin).
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Mountainhead, review: Jesse Armstrong's takedown of tech bros is even more cynical than Succession
A Succession spin-off film? Well, not quite, but Jesse Armstrong 's feature-length satire of the extremely rich and increasingly powerful, Mountainhead (Sky Atlantic), doesn't stray too far from the Roy family formula, and features the behind-the-scenes involvement of a whole host of his Succession team, including composer Nicholas Britell. However, instead of tarring and feathering Murdoch-esque media empires, Armstrong (who writes and directs) has set his sights on the new money – the billionaire tech bros and their grandiose plans to 'disrupt' the world. It is, somehow, even more cynical than Succession. This exquisitely performed dark comedy is a claustrophobic chamber piece that takes place in a Utah mega-lodge up in the snow-capped mountains, where four old pals – 'Mount Techmore' – meet for a poker weekend while the rest of the world seemingly falls apart. It is, in essence, a high-falutin' episode of Inside No 9. The reason for the global unrest is the world's richest man, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a tweaked-out sociopath whose latest updates to his social media platform Traam have unleashed havoc, thanks to an explosion of fake news and generative AI. The markets are in free-fall, sectarian violence is erupting everywhere, politicians are being assassinated. The world order is ending. While on the outside, Venis is thrilled by it all, he desperately needs the help of his frenemy Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose sophisticated AI-filtering system could restore Traam's credibility and the world's sanity. Joining them for a weekend of tension and glorious one-liners are Steve Carell 's 'dark-money Gandalf' Randall, the elder statesman of tech bros, and host Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), a financial pygmy (he's worth a paltry half billion) who desperately needs the others to invest in his meditation app. He's called his tasteless pile 'Mountainhead' and, yes, that name is tackled early on by Jeff: 'What, like Fountainhead? Who was your interior designer – Ayn Bland?' Needless to say, Armstrong's script is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the zingers, and you could spend an enjoyable evening in the pub debating your favourite gags, but it would all amount to nothing without Mountainhead's unsparing psychological insight. Venis is a terrific monster, a ripped frat boy who thinks he can solve the Israel-Palestine conflict with 'bananas' online content and is obsessed with turning the world population 'transhuman'. The quartet bandy their callousness and casualness towards human suffering with grotesque machismo, and sprinkle their jargon-heavy, ultra-online conversations with half-arsed references to Hegel, Plato and Kant. When they get wind of the worldwide upheaval, the bros – apart from the minutely less terrible Jeff – smell an opportunity, triggering some serious God-complex one-upmanship. This leads to a nail-biting denouement that manages to be extremely funny yet without the sophistication of what came before it. As with Succession, Mountainhead is a caustic, defiant and righteously furious diatribe against the maniacal egos of those with all of the money and all of the power, but no vanishingly little moral fibre – and all wrapped up by the best jokes in the business.
