‘Move fast, break stuff’: how tech bros became Hollywood’s go-to baddie in 2025

From Stanley Tucci’s imperious tech titan to Lex Luthor’s distractingly hot CEO and Elon Musk-esque blowhards, films this year took us inside the billionaire mindset Between the slash-and-burn US government reboot led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 has felt like peak obnoxious tech bro. Fittingly, jargon-spouting, self-regarding digital visionaries also became Hollywood’s go-to baddies this year in everything from blockbusters to slapstick spoofs. Spare a thought for the overworked props departments tasked with mocking up fake Forbes magazine covers heralding yet another smirking white guy as “Master of the Metaverse” or whatever. With such market saturation, the risk is that all these delusional dudes blend into one smarmy morass. It felt reasonable to expect that Stanley Tucci might sprinkle a little prosciutto on The Electric State , Netflix’s no-expense-spared alt-history robot fantasia. As Ethan Skate – creator of t...

La Syndicaliste review Isabelle Huppert is fascinating in blood-boiling injustice drama

French film about real-life trade union whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, accused of inventing her assault

‘My name is Maureen Kearney. I didn’t lie. I didn’t make anything up.” This French drama about a blood-boiling real-life case of injustice is the story of whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, who for four years lived with a criminal record: falsely convicted of wasting police time, accused of inventing her rape. It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect. (Kearney is actually Irish, but has lived and worked in France since the mid 1980s; Huppert plays her as French).

Adapted from a book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre, this is a film of two halves, beginning with the whistleblowing. It’s 2011, and Kearney is a powerful trade union official, going into battle for the 50,000 staff at French nuclear engineering giant Areva in her armour of full makeup and blond hair so immaculately blow-dried it could deflect arrows. Kearney has the trade minister’s number in her phone and can summon President Sarkozy to a meeting. (Rumour has it he called her “a hysteric in a skirt”.) She turns whistleblower after being handed documents revealing secret plans to sell off France’s nuclear technology to China.

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