Actually trying to talk about Asteroid City, on any level more involved than “I really liked it, best movie of 2023 so far, 4.5 stars out of 5” (which is, for the record, the short version of this review) feels like willfully stepping into the world’s most obvious trap. There’s a recurring plot point in […]
The French Dispatch isn’t the “best” Wes Anderson movie, and it’s maybe not even the “most” Wes Anderson movie. But I do think it might well be the most “fuck you” Wes Anderson movie, the one where you are either going to follow modern American cinema’s fussiest and most aesthetically controlling director where he is […]
Every Wes Anderson film is “quirky”, but I think with Isle of Dogs – the director’s ninth feature film in 22 years – we’ve finally gotten to the first one that’s just flat-out fucking weird. Whether it is the good kind of weird or the not-so-good kind is not a question I expect to resolve […]
15 years and change since Rushmore, it would seem that there couldn’t possibly be any more development in the aesthetics of Wes Anderson, a director whose personal stamp is about as obvious as anybody’s ever has been. And yet here we are, and The Grand Budapest Hotel exists, and it feels like it might be […]
The easy, perhaps even the smart thing to do would be to use Moonrise Kingdom as a yardstick for judging everything Wes Anderson has been up to in the last decade and a half: but that is a line of argument that just makes everybody sad, and I will attempt to limit myself on that […]
With Fantastic Mr. Fox, the notoriously fussy Wes Anderson has I think found the ideal medium for his stylistic preoccupations, not just for his sake but for his audience’s. I know that I’m not the only person to love both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, only to find The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and […]
Anyone who is paying attention knows what to expect from a Wes Anderson film: quirky, hyperstylised characters speaking quirky, hyperstylised dialogue as the move on straight lines through aggressively precise compositions filled with highly detailed and deliberately artificial set design, variations of the Futura sans serif font plastered on every surface that a font can […]
Wes Anderson, new media titan that he is, has released a short film unto the internets: Hotel Chevalier, the prologue to his about-to-open The Darjeeling Limited. Short version: it’s absolutely the best thing he’s done since Rushmore (yes, even better than that extraordinary American Express ad from last year). Long version: Anderson is nothing if […]
