Tuesday new releases: 3 June 2025

I once had a boss for whom no deal was ever, truly, final. I would hear him on the phone to sup­pli­ers a week after we had taken deliv­ery1, say­ing “Yeah, that doesn’t really work for me now” and basic­ally force a rene­go­ti­ation of terms.

I was reminded of him a few times this week­end, while watch­ing Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead. Both fea­ture busi­ness­men with con­front­ing nego­ti­at­ing styles and both are about men for whom busi­ness is a sub­sti­tute for some­thing that’s kind of broken inside them.

The Phoenician Scheme is ded­ic­ated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, the Lebanese con­struc­tion entre­pren­eur Fouad Malouf, and its cent­ral char­ac­ter, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is a cha­ris­mat­ic globe­trot­ting deal-maker intent on put­ting togeth­er one final grand pack­age. He’s sur­vived sev­er­al plane crashes and appears to be a per­man­ent tar­get for assas­sin­a­tion and if his time is really going to be up, he wants to leave some­thing truly import­ant behind. The Phoenician Scheme itself is a quix­ot­ic com­bin­a­tion of infra­struc­ture pro­jects that will breathe life, com­merce and an eco­nom­ic­ally vibrant future into an unlikely desert landscape.

In order to con­struct this trans­form­a­tion­al net­work of rail tun­nels, ports, dams and hydro-electric power gen­er­a­tion, Korda needs a con­sor­ti­um of investors but a power­ful cabal of glob­al busi­ness interests are sab­ot­aging his deal. By arti­fi­cially driv­ing up the price of hammered riv­ets, the eco­nom­ics of the scheme no longer stack up leav­ing “the gap” – a chasm between what the pro­ject will cost and what has been com­mit­ted. This neces­sit­ates a frantic trip around the world to rene­go­ti­ate everyone’s invest­ment, includ­ing a pickup bas­ket­ball game with Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, tak­ing a bul­let for Mathieu Almaric and receiv­ing a blood trans­fu­sion from Jeffrey Wright.

On the jour­ney with him are his new sci­ence tutor slash admin­is­trat­ive assist­ant (Michael Cera) and – most import­antly – his estranged daugh­ter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). She is about to ded­ic­ate her life to God, a devel­op­ment that is more than per­tin­ent because Korda him­self is hav­ing vis­ions of hav­ing to argue his way into heav­en without much success.

This is entre­pren­eur­ship as immor­tal­ity – build­ing some­thing that will out­last you and that will finally prove to the world that you are more suc­cess­ful than your psy­cho­path­ic half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Achieving immor­tal­ity through mak­ing things is, of course, what artists like Mr. Anderson do, but, as Korda slowly comes to real­ise, you can also do it through your chil­dren. Especially if you adopt enough of them that one or two might make some­thing great themselves. 

You’ll notice that I haven’t writ­ten too much here about Mr. Anderson’s sig­na­ture film­mak­ing style. That’s because it is a far less inter­est­ing aspect of the pic­ture than its con­tent and, besides, I’m sure most of you already know wheth­er that style appeals to you or not. Suffice to say that his senses of humour, tim­ing, col­our and com­pos­i­tion are all hap­pily intact.

At least one of the tech entre­pren­eurs in Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead also has immor­tal­ity on his mind. On his way to a bil­lion­aire bro’s week­end in the Utah moun­tains, Steve Carell’s titan investor, Randall, tells the doc­tor with the can­cer dia­gnos­is that he’s “a sim­pleton” and starts mak­ing calls about how far off human­ity is from being able to upload our con­scious­ness to the cloud. Ten years, he’s told. Five if Jeff (Ramy Youssef) will license his AI algorithm to Venis’ (Cory Michael Smith) explod­ing social media platform.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

It’s lit­er­ally explod­ing, in fact, because the latest ver­sion allows users to upload per­fect deep­fake videos that mali­cious forces are using to destabil­ise the glob­al polit­ic­al and social fab­ric. In the course of a week­end with no assist­ants, no hangers on, no fam­il­ies (a rule that all will break at some point), this quar­tet will real­ise that they have the wealth and power to take advant­age of all this uncer­tainty and take con­trol of the world – or at least what’s left of it.

Armstrong cre­ated the bril­liant HBO show Succession and it wouldn’t sur­prise me if this par­tic­u­lar scen­ario was one that came up in the writers’ room for that show but was left on the cut­ting room floor. Either that or one of the loc­a­tion scouts found a $65 mil­lion lux­ury home near Park City and they couldn’t find a way to use it soon­er. Either way, Armstrong makes his debut as a dir­ect­or with the full sup­port of the exper­i­enced Succession whānau and a strong cast who all man­age to inhab­it both the ridicu­lous levels of self-confidence that bil­lions of dol­lars of wealth gives you, but also the patho­lo­gic­al lack of empathy that comes from being insu­lated from any real-world concerns.

The tech they talk about is alarm­ingly plaus­ible – if not already old hat – and Armstrong’s ear for cor­por­ate jargon-infused dia­logue is as attuned as ever, but it is the pathet­ic man-child beha­viour that we are left with. The bul­ly­ing, the game-playing, the self-aggrandising and the self-delusion – all it’s miss­ing is the ketamine.

I spent almost an hour and a half with the Philippou broth­ers’ Bring Her Back think­ing that I would respect all the craft on dis­play and give it a “yes, but not for me” review, fol­lowed by some form of hyp­no­ther­apy that would per­man­ently erase what I’d seen.

Then it did some­thing with the end­ing that I found quite mov­ing – some­thing that helped me recal­ib­rate what I’d seen before. This was a sur­prise because the act­or con­cerned – Sally Hawkins – is not someone who has ever done that for me before.

Hawkins plays a clas­sic hor­ror trope, the bad step­moth­er – in this case a foster moth­er to two orphaned teen­agers (Sora Wong and Billy Barratt). Wong plays Piper who has a sight dis­ab­il­ity which means that she doesn’t notice that there’s some­thing very wrong in the remote 60s-modern house that they have been sent to. Barratt’s Andy is older – three months away from being able to take guard­i­an­ship of Piper – and he can sense that something’s up. The mute, star­ing, ten-year-old Oli (Jonah Wren Phillips) is a start.

Despite their lar­rikin YouTube back­ground, the Philippous have got some ser­i­ous film­mak­ing chops, as they demon­strated in Talk to Me in 2023 and when I star­ted think­ing how good it would be if they turned their hand to mak­ing a prop­er film I real­ised what a snob I was being. Bring Her Back is a prop­er film but it’s also one that loves being a hor­ror film with all that entails (and entrails).

Friend of F&S, Miranda Harcourt was an act­ing coach on Bring Her Back and talks about it in her latest newsletter: