Who dares waste Elisabeth Moss and Christoph Waltz like this?
No Wes Anderson film to this day throws as much quirky s**t at you (whether its paper shots, tiny subtitles, big actor appearances, timeline changes, filter changes, general… changes, holy f**k I can’t keep track, etc.) than his latest The French Dispatch does. A 3-part anthology told swiftly like an actual skim through an everyday journal magazine: the first — and by far the best — being a romantic prison tale between an imprisoned Benicio Del Toro (nothing new) and a security guard art model, the second being an intentionally pseudo-intellectual boys vs girls political know-it-all battle / an “aww” so adorable coming-of-age story, and the third feeling almost like an evocation of Anderson’s own position as a creative director often criticized for his inscrutable stylistic compulsions, as if the first story didn’t already allude this enough. Yet, it all just feels right to me, and as per usual, I don’t mind the mindlessness in his comedic attention to detail. If we can enjoy the same superhero formula flick every once in a while, we can sure as hell do the same with an Anderson.
Anddd… for the first time in forever, a Wes Anderson movie does not end almost exactly the same as his other 2000s movies. Woah. Plus, it totally works!
Verdict: B
2021 Ranked, Wes Anderson Ranked
“The French Dispatch” is now playing in theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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