Reviewed: ‘Mountainhead,’ ‘Straw,’ ‘Echo Valley’ and “Fountain of Youth’
‘Mountainhead’ (2025)
This smug billionaire-boys-behaving-badly dramedy from “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong landed just as the relationship between Trump and Musk imploded fantastically in the headlines, not so much an aptly ironic parody as a loaded diaper. Why is America so obsessed with the rich, when most of us – the other 90, 95 or 99 percent – are not so? The fantasy that money can change your life and buy you happiness? With Trump and Musk and this sour lot, it’s more about power and being right, even if you’re not and money is an afterthought (though how much you have is a boasting point). In an airy mountain chalet, four tech bros with complicated pasts and agendas hang out for a weekend of poker and backdoor business parlays. If you called them Zuck, Musk, Altman and Kalanick (the series “Super Pumped” on the Uber founder is a worthy watch), you’d not be far off. The driving plot is the alter-reality tech platform Traam run by Venis/Ven (Cory Michael Smith, who played Chevy Chase in “Saturday Night”). It has 4 billion users but has been coopted to make deepfake news stories with devastating results worldwide. Newscasts show the bloody inflaming of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and retaliation to a faked story in which women and children in a house of worship are barricaded in, firebombed and killed. People are literally dying because of Traam. Does this give pause or stop Venis from pushing his next release? Nah, he sends it out to the world with the lede “Fuuck!” because “two ‘u’s are cool.” That’s the kind of fuck-all we’re dealing with. When asked about the mayhem Traam is causing, Venis retorts that “The first time people saw a movie, everybody ran screaming because they thought they were going to get hit by a train. The answer to that was not stop the movies. The answer was: Show more movies.” (It’s here that we can drop the “V” and add a “P.”) Ven’s weekend cohort of self-loving insufferables include Randall (Steve Carell), a fat-walleted venture capitalist recovering from cancer, Souper Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), the host who hasn’t quite made it into the billionaire club, and Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, “Mr. Robot”), the most sensible of the bunch, who has just kicked off a tool that could thwart Traam’s AI mayhem but won’t sell it to Ven because of past grievances and ideological differences. As the world continues to go to hell on the widescreen TVs around the chalet, the boys debate taking over and running some of the countries whose governments have fallen. When the water in the manse runs dry, our quartet thinks sabotage and of an imminent terrorist attack and head to the bowling alley bunker below. “Mountainhead” is pretty much a stage play in form, and the actors are all in and hit their mark. What doesn’t is the satire that roils in human misery with a nod and a wink at cheekiness so we can walk a mile in the shoes of the rich and famous who wouldn’t give five dollars to a starving family on the street.
‘Straw’ (2025)
In the recently released actioner “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” the film’s female protagonist, played by Ana de Armas, is told to “fight like a woman.” The same tagline could be applied in this serious social condemnation from Tyler Perry with Taraji P. Henson as Janiyah Wiltkinson, a struggling single mother who works as a checkout clerk and has a very bad day. Each character has the world stacked against them and a small child to protect – and are equally fierce in doing so – but de Armas’ assassin relishes such odds and is trained in taking out whole legions in a fandom fantasy; Janiyah is a Black woman living the real world with no support, no compassion and red tape and racism tripping her up at every turn. It’s an unflinching take on an all-too-common occurrence and Perry lets no one off the hook, not even the Black community Janiyah is part of. In the “Falling Down”-esque scenario, Janiyah needs to get seizure meds and lunch money to her daughter at school. Along the way she’s threatened with eviction, confronted by family services, run off the road by a racist off-duty cop who pins the road rage incident on her, and is fired from her job. The day gets worse – way worse – with Janiyah ultimately, with gun in hand, demands a bank teller cash her last check (she doesn’t have ID, thus the gun as a last-ditch frustration measure) to get that lunch money for her daughter and save her apartment. In 20 clicks we’re in a “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) situation, and that’s where the film starts to find its pulse and heart as the seeds of compassion and sisterhood start to build between Janiyah and the bank manager (Sherri Shepherd) and negotiator, detective Raymond (pop artist Teyana Taylor, who will get a longer look in Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming “One Battle After Another”). It’s a bold DIY do by Perry (shot in his studios in Atlanta) after a bunch of gag-propelled Medea films. There are degrees of overcontrivance that threaten the bounds of credibility, but Henson (“Hidden Figures” and Oscar-nominated for her part in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) carries it commandingly with a deeply felt performance that builds through slow, emotive mastery. It’s a thespian tour de force with apt and able offsets in Taylor and especially Shepherd (“Precious”), who brings an impeccable, subtly quiet tremble to the part. Like Ryan Coogler’s recent “Sinners,” “Straw” has a few ending redos that go far to provide extra social bite but bring the film close to the edge. Perry puts us in Janiyah’s world, and Henson makes us live it. If you don’t walk away with new eyes, you’re up there in that chalet from “Mountainhead,” diddling about on Traam. As a matter of fact, I could see Traam being the source behind all misunderstanding and misdirection that leads to Janiyah’s unenviable situation. “Straw” and “Mountainhead” are entirely different films that endorse the same message: The rich keep getting richer, and the have-nots pay for it.
‘Echo Valley’ (2025)
A fairly taut if wildly implausible home-invasion thriller in the vein of “The Strangers” (2008) or last year’s “Speak No Evil” that uses some stellar performances to bolster a thin premise. Kate Garretson (a game Julianne Moore) lives on a horse farm in the bucolic Pennsylvania dell of the title. She’s grieving from the recent loss of her wife, who was thrown from a horse and broke her neck, and starving for money to keep the farm and her daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney, “Euphoria,” “White Lotus”) clean. Her well-off ex-husband and father of Claire (Kyle MacLachlan, in a thankless micropart) won’t give her another dime. It’s hard to tell if it’s bitterness, tough love or just wanting nothing more to do with it. The push comes when Claire shows up with her junkie boyfriend, Ryan (Edmund Donovan), and their mousy yet menacing dealer, Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson, “Ex Machina,” unrecognizable and excellent here). Basically, Ryan owes Jackie $10,000 and Claire believes mom can make it right. Kate refuses (and doesn’t have the money anyway), and Claire attacks her and tries to kidnap the prized dog of the house as ransom – then returns days later, shaken, telling Kate she’s killed Ryan accidentally in a lovers’ quarrel and needs help cleaning up the mess. Mom being mom, and not wanting to see her baby go to jail, acts as decisively, only to have Jackie then show up looking for $100,000 to keep his mouth shut about the disposal. The film becomes a game of psychological chess, with Jackie shrewdly isolating and manipulating Kate by shooting her up with heroin and taking away her electronic devices. The subsequent plot twists are fairly well done, and Fiona Shaw shows up, a great addition to the cast as Kate’s loyal friend. “Echo Valley” is a tense yet forgettable journey in the darkness that surrounds addiction.
‘Fountain of Youth’ (2025)
In this “National Treasure”-cum-“Mission: Impossible” knockoff, the issue isn’t so much the lifting, the miscast lead or the wasting of Natalie Portman’s talents, but more so the slack composition and lazy execution. Good (“Snatch,” “Covenant”) or bad (“Swept Away,” “Revolver”), director Guy Ritchie usually keeps things visually compelling and taut, but in this globe-hopping quest, sadly even that is missing. The miscast lead is John Krasinski as Luke Purdue, an Indiana Jones-styled relic hunter. Paintings seem to be his main jam. To get one, he raises the Lusitania; later, there’s a whole lot going on in the inner bowels of the Great Pyramids in scenes that are nearly cloned, cel by cel, from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). Caught in the jet stream of action is Portman as Luke’s sister Charlotte, just getting out of a bad marriage and worried about the custody of her kid, and there’s something their dad did back in the day that plays into the present – just what that is doesn’t much matter, as the film is pure MacGuffin fluff. Hot on Luke’s heels is some shadowy org led by an enigmatic figure known as The Elder (Stanley Tucci), who pretty has a deployment of commandos with assault weapons at every far-flung destination Luke hits. In theory, if Luke gets all the “pieces,” he gets the map and key to the Fountain of Youth – given that all roads point to North Africa, I guess Ponce de León clearly had it wrong. In the mix is Domhnall Gleeson (“Ex Machina”) as the wealthy billionaire funding the whole shebang. While I normally like Krasinski, a pleasingly casual, nonchalant comedic presence in “The Office” series and the brains behind the “Quiet Place” films, he flounders here as a JV mashup of “The Saint” and Robert Downey in Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” films. He suffers by the juxtaposition of Tom Cruise currently burning up the box-office in “Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning.” As flimsy as the “National Treasure” films were, there was an endearing hokeyness to them, and Nic Cage usually gets you there just by showing up. With “Fountain of Youth,” everything looks old, uninspired and tired. Besides Eiza González as the fiery leader of The Elder’s covert-ops team, no one escapes the indignity of this soulless cinematic scavenger hunt.
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