Steve Carell

Mountainhead

by
Randall, Jeff, Souper and Venis

Mountainhead is the movie for people who want more Succession but accept that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy and his vile but irresistible family are not coming back. Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the Succession guy, it takes a similarly vile bunch of tech bros, deposits them in a swish mountaintop mansion and follows them over a weekend of escalating mayhem as the platforms and apps that made them rich wreak havoc in the outside world. Armstrong has been telling this story – awful people being awful – for quite a while now, either comedically in TV shows like Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep and more darkly in Succession. A … Read more

Despicable Me 4

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Gru presents his ID for the Anti-Villain League

Are you still here? That’s how I approached Despicable Me 4, an intellectual property that had done all its emotional work already in the first movie – how super-super villain Gru became a decent sort – but somehow miraculously re-purposed itself and sailed on to franchise glory. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this fourth iteration is that everyone involved seems to still give a stuff. The story is zippy, the voice cast is committed, the animation is lively and colourful, it has a good soundtrack. It’s busy, too busy really, but it’s still pulling out the stops, being inventive when it could just ride along on its own coat tails. You could start … Read more