Mountainhead (2025)

A friend who watched this said this movie is like every VC dinner party in SF. I have not been to any VC dinner parties so I cannot testify. However, it’s safe to say I did not enjoy this. When I watched the trailer, my first thought was that it was just going to be a soulless succession copycat with all of the noise and none of the heart, and I was correct. 

Credit to the writers: it’s a complete dialogue-driven movie and the dialogue itself is decent writing. But if a story is entirely driven by dialogue, you need to be able to care about the characters that say these words. They don’t even have to be likable but there must be some variance to them so they can have substantial conflicts that mean something. There is none here. They all essentially have the same personality and same insecurities, which renders the conflict between them not just meaningless, but also very boring. 

Maybe that is the point - and point made - but the movie doesn’t work because of it. Wasted performance from a very talented cast. The only saving grace is that Ramy Youssef begging for his life from the window of a sauna room in his underwear is lowkey kind of hot.