Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:
In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness.”
He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains. No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.
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