What to stream this week: Steve Carell’s tech bro satire and five more to add to your list

This week’s picks include a new comedy from the creator Succession, a new movie by Guy Ritchie and a gentle documentary about quilting in US prisons.

Mountainhead ★★★½ (Max)

In this maniacal black comedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, the four horsemen of the digital apocalypse go on a boys’ weekend. For tech titans Randall (Steve Carell), Venis (Cory Michael Smith), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman) it’s all fun and games, even – or is that especially? – as the world starts falling to bits. Turns out the generative AI feature Venis rolled out to his platform’s 4 billion users has led to deepfake videos that are stoking sectarian violence and crashing stock markets. Oopsies.

From left: Cory Michael Smith as Venis, Steve Carell as Randall, Ramy Youssef as Jeff and Jason Schwartzman as Hugo in Mountainhead.

This is ripe, logical territory for Armstrong, who ended the familial warfare of Succession with the old media empire of the fictional Roy family being acquired by an ascendant Swedish tech mogul. There’s greater wealth, more hubris, and less guardrails for Armstrong’s new subjects.

The comparisons aren’t exact, but imagine the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman getting together. “We only have G20 bandwidth,” Hugo remarks,as the complaints from smaller countries pile up. Hanging at Hugo’s mountain retreat, the quartet is too successful to truly care, or reveal their true selves. They hide personal truths and pretend they’re not rivals. Jeff’s company has the best AI, but doesn’t see why he should make a deal to share it with Venis. There’s panic buying in Tokyo, 500 dead in India, but the chaos they caused is too good an opportunity. “Slightly gnarly, highly cathartic,” reasons Venis, as atrocities pile up on their phone screens.

This is high farce fed by 21st century fears; a Dr Strangelove where the bomb is inside every smartphone on the planet. Given the nod by Randall, the group’s elder statesman and faux-intellectual, they dream bigger. Their “Montreux Razz Festival” turns into a death watch for the nation state: apparently running Paraguay isn’t that difficult. Is this a fever dream or the near future? Armstrong’s chamber piece plays it both ways. The point is that nothing Venis, the richest person alive, says is merely tech bro excess. He’s too powerful to be delusional.

Steve Carell plays tech titan billionaire Randall in the satire Mountainhead.

Armstrong’s coolly composed direction captures the privilege run amok, while the finely honed cast know that the laughs have to feed off the horror their toxic characters fuel. It all takes place over 36 hours, raising the stakes to work around the lack of background or lived-in context. It gets intimate and silly, but the distance between the digital robber barons and the outside world is the same as the movie’s gap between plausibility and execution. There’s an edge here that Armstrong baulks at, but the luxury trip there is sharply amusing.

Fountain of Youth ★★½ (Apple TV+)

Directed with gusto but not much guile by Guy Ritchie, this adventure film about estranged siblings – played by Natalie Portman and John Krasinski – searching for a mythological wonder liberally updates a slew of predecessors. The most obvious is the Indiana Jones movies, especially The Last Crusade, but there’s also Tomb Raider, National Treasure, and The Da Vinci Code. Yes, this movie absolutely features conspiratorial secrets hidden in Renaissance masterpieces.

Eiza González, John Krasinksi and Natalie Portman race around the world in Guy Ritchie’s new adventure romp, Fountain of Youth.

As a homage, it’s effective. Ritchie works to a family-friendly tone, keeping the language clean and the action scenes bloodless as treasure hunter Luke Purdue (Krasinski) criss-crosses the globe, stealing famous works of art and entangling his curator sister, Charlotte (Portman), in his shenanigans. Anything that’s choreographed is accomplished, whether it’s car chases through Bangkok and then London or Luke’s hand-to-hand combat in a train carriage with a formidable new adversary, Esme (Eiza Gonzalez).

The problem is whenever the pace slows. The dynamic between Luke and Charlotte is tiresome and one-dimensional: he’s glib and freewheeling, she’s uptight and facing a divorce battle. Obviously, Charlotte will loosen up, but their exchanges feature boilerplate dialogue. None of the other elements introduced, such as billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson) who is financing Luke, provide little but the increasingly obvious. The location work, including the Pyramids of Giza, is old-school blockbuster thrilling, but the film lacks for wit and twisted invention.

Shifting Gears ★★½ (Disney+)

Shifting Gears stars (from left) Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, Seann William Scott, Maxwell Simkins, Barrett Margolis, Tim Allen and Kat Dennings.

Even though his signature hit, Home Improvement, ended in 1999, Tim Allen continues to be a sitcom staple. The latest multi-camera comedy for the voice of Buzz Lightyear finds him playing an irascible widower, vintage car restorer Matt Parker, whose routines get derailed when his estranged daughter, Riley (Kat Dennings), and her two children return to the family home. There’s some father and daughter angst, mostly expressed through hackneyed dialogue oversold with studio audience applause, plus some cultural sniping and old dog new tricks mishaps. It’s professional, but nothing here remotely surprises.

Sarah Silverman: Postmortem ★★★½ (Netflix)

Sarah Silverman at the Beacon Theatre in New York.

As a stand-up comic, Sarah Silverman made her name leaning into shocking punchlines. She was very smart about playing dumb. Silverman’s new live special has a far more delicate foundation: in the space of a single week in May 2023, both Silverman’s beloved father and stepmother passed away after significant illnesses.

While acknowledging she’s working through a lot, Silverman’s riffing on what happened, complete with recordings of key moments, is often genuinely funny and deeply honest. The seams show at times – there’s no way around that – but the best bits linger long after the laughter fades.

This City is Ours ★★★ (Stan)

Sean Bean in This City is Ours.

The city in question is Liverpool, although in large part the set-up of this crime family drama is generic. Hard-nosed drug lord Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean) wants to retire to his Spanish villa, but his succession plan causes instability when he leans towards his deputy, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce), over his ambitious son, Jamie (Jack McMullen).

With wives and girlfriends doing their best power behind the throne plays, double-crosses and organisational crises arise. There’s menace aplenty, and bursts of violence no one wants to acknowledge, but however capable some elements are, initially at least not one is essential.

Quilters ★★★★ (Netflix)

Just over half an hour in length, Jenifer McShane’s empathetic documentary about a group of inmates at an American maximum-security prison, who voluntarily spend their workdays making quilts for foster children, has a terrific intimacy and plain-spoken honesty.

For the men in the workroom, some of whom have been incarcerated much of their adult lives, the space allows for the satisfaction of creativity and the freedom to reflect. Without being overt, the quilting program allows them at least the possibility of genuinely engaging with their lives.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.