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Even if there were no identifying credits, it would be easy to tell that Mountainhead is the work of Jesse Armstrong. The award-winning creator of the landmark HBO series Succession makes his film directorial debut with this similarly themed exploration of toxic masculinity and rich people behaving very, very badly. But while it features plenty of Armstrong’s trademark nastily witty, profane dialogue and incisive characterizations, this effort, premiering on HBO and HBO Max (unless they change the name yet again), feels more slapdash in its execution and minor in its effect. It’s certainly entertaining enough while you’re watching it, thanks to the expert performances of its four lead actors, but it’s unlikely to make as much of an impact in the cultural zeitgeist. Mountainhead The Bottom LineEntertaining enough, but very minor. Release date: Friday, May 30 Cast: Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith Director-screenwriter:...

In Honey Don’t!, the latest film in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s intended lesbian B-movie trilogy, Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a tough but glamorous private investigator in Bakersfield, California. Honey is typically in the business of infidelity, taking cases involving suspicious spouses and their philandering partners. But at the start of Coen’s prankish film, which premiered at Cannes and will be released in theaters by Focus Features on Aug. 22, the sleuth finds herself drawn into a higher-stakes mystery. The death of a local woman leads Honey down a slippery path involving religious cults, megalomaniacal pastors and an unexpected romance. For the most part, Honey Don’t! lives in the same thematic universe as Coen’s first solo narrative venture Drive-Away Dolls, which the director also co-wrote with Cooke. In that film, Qualley played a lesbian Lothario, who, after a bad break-up with her police officer...

Exactly one week after the opening of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, there are at least three things that everyone here at the fest seems to agree on. Firstly, in what is probably a reflection of these uncertain economic times (thanks, Trump), there has been a striking dearth of promotional fanfare along the Croisette, where tons of installations, stand-ups and stunts can usually be found. This year, it’s really just been luxury cars and, in front of the Carlton, a Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning display. Secondly, there have been precious few announcements of high-profile acquisitions, which could be for the same reason, or because many of the hotly-anticipated films have thus far underwhelmed fest attendees, or perhaps because distributors, in a post-Emilia Pérez era, are taking a bit more time to vet potential partners before committing. Thirdly, a year after a record number of films that...

One of the constants in the intimate films of Joachim Trier is his ability to bring out the very best in his actors. With emotional acuity, he mines their inner lives for truths that seem subcutaneously to connect his cast to his characters. Actors don’t so much play roles in the Danish-Norwegian director’s work as live inside them. His transcendent 2022 feature, The Worst Person in the World, is both a romantic comedy and an anti-rom-com, a close study of a woman navigating a messy transitional period, alive with intergenerational insights and foibles most of us can recognize from some point in our lives. Trier’s exquisite new film, Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi), shifts its gaze from romantic to familial love, at times harmonious and at others tainted by resentment and anger. The director’s observation of the mutable contracts between sisters, and even...

Unless you followed the ups and downs — well, mostly the downs — of Julian Assange’s life over the past 15 years, you’ll have to wait until the last half-hour of Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, The Six Billion Dollar Man, to understand what its title means. By that point, the WikiLeaks founder had been holed up for over six years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he faced imminent arrest by the UK authorities. It’s then that we learn how the first Trump administration offered, via the IMF, to loan Ecuador’s government $6.5 billion if they agreed to kick Assange out. The move is not exactly shocking, especially coming from a dealmaker like Trump, and it shows just how much the U.S. authorities were willing to pay so they could nab one of their most wanted men. The...

Kelly Reichardt returns to the Cannes Film Festival with The Mastermind, a 1970s-set anti-heist film that’s less about the robbery and more about its emotional and social fallout. The latest feature from the First Cow and Showing Up director is another exploration in quiet rebellion and the tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility. Premiering Friday night, it’s the last competition film to screen on the Croisette, and among the most anticipated. Art house distributor and streamer Mubi will release The Mastermind in North and Latin America and in select territories, including the U.K. and Germany, with The Match Factory handling international sales. The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor as James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney, an art-school dropout and unemployed carpenter who plans that one big job that will change his life: A daytime heist from a scarcely-guarded local museum. The plot was inspired by several actual snatch-and-grab jobs from the era,...

The actress says she’d be more than willing to keep playing herself in the show’s second season. A short list of things Zoë Kravitz does during her three-episode guest stint on The Studio, playing herself: • She pretends not to care about winning a Golden Globe while really caring whether she does; • Accidentally ingests a dangerous amount of shrooms at a CinemaCon party in Las Vegas; • Climbs on a hotel nightstand and refuses to come down, because she perceives it as being too far a drop; • Conflates the movie character she’s there to promote — a vampire assassin named Blackwing — with herself; Related Stories TV Here's How 'The Studio' Got All Those Season One Guest Stars -- and Its "White Whale" TV How 'The Studio' Creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Seduced (and Skewered) Hollywood   • Plaintively wails “Where’s Zoë?!” when others decide to refer to her as...

"It's something I wanted to protect about the show," says season two's new showrunner Tony Tost about leaning further into Natasha Lyonne's weekly adventures. The fifth episode of Poker Face season two brings Natasha Lyonne‘s Charlie Cale to the dugout of a minor league baseball team, where she investigates suspected foul play in the death of a player who was killed by a fast ball to the head from a faulty old pitching machine. Tony Tost, who took over as showrunner for the second season, wrote the episode, “Hometown Hero,” and says it was a world that creator Rian Johnson wanted to play in for the Peacock murder-mystery’s return. The episode also solidifies Poker Face as a true week-to-week offering. After resolving the lingering plot from season one in the third episode (the first three episodes released together at launch), the fourth episode took Charlie down...

Nicole Kassell chats with THR about working on the first two episodes of the Netflix series and rethinking the sirens myth. Perhaps the sirens came calling for director Nicole Kassell. Before signing on to direct the first two episodes of Netflix’s limited series Sirens, Kassell recalls, ”I read that script, and it just knocked my socks off.” The script was Molly Smith Metzler’s story that follows Devon (played by Meghann Fahy), who ventures to a lavish island to confront her younger sister Simone (Milly Alcock) and ask her to come back home to Buffalo to help with their ailing father (Bill Camp). However, Devon is caught off-guard when she realizes her sister is no longer the woman she once knew and now works for socialite Michaela “Kiki” Kell (Julianne Moore), who not only reigns supreme on the island and its...

Margaret Atwood, creator Bruce Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd and 20-plus producers, castmembers and execs reveal how a classic novel became the Emmy-winning emblem of anti-Trump resistance. The Handmaid’s Tale is ending. But to borrow a quote from Margaret Atwood, the end is not the end. And the Hulu series wasn’t the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale, either. Back in 1985, Atwood published her best-selling novel of the same name, a near-future dystopian tale about a totalitarian regime, the Republic of Gilead, overthrowing the U.S. government and stripping women of their rights amid a global fertility crisis. The story was told from the point of view of a woman who is renamed Offred after she’s captured, separated from her daughter and forced to be a “handmaid” in Gilead (fertile surrogates for the elite ruling class). Related Stories TV Streaming Ratings: 'You' Final Season Hits...