Review: Isle of Dogs (2018)

* * 1/2
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, and the Wes Anderson players

I like to think that the title of Wes Anderson's latest film, though it refers literally to the location of much of the film's action, is its first joke. Traditionally, dogs do not fare well in Anderson's films. When they die, their deaths tend to be brutally violent (see The Royal Tenenbaums, see Moonrise Kingdom). When you say this film's title aloud, it sounds like "I love dogs," as in "despite killing fictional pets every chance I get, I'm not a dog hating monster;" and when you watch the film, it starts to feel like it's playing with you a little bit, using your knowledge of the fates of dogs in previous films to tease you at various points with the possibility that some of the canine characters have met with terrible fates, only to reveal it was a fakeout. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but maybe Anderson is having a bit of fun with his audience, making his meta-humor just as offbeat as his regular humor. However, playful as it might be, Isle of Dogs is actually pretty serious stuff and makes for Anderson's most overtly political (for better or worse) film to date.

Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman

Fantastic Mr. Fox so perfectly exemplifies Wes Anderson's storytelling and visual style that it's amazing that it took him 5 films to get there. Adapted from the children's book by Roald Dahl, the film allows Anderson to indulge in both the homemade aesthetic that typically informs his work as well as the thematic concern over relationships between sons and father (or father figures) which comes up time and again in his films. Funny, charming, and beautifully rendered, Fantastic Mr. Fox is easily one of Anderson's best films - and I say that as someone whose feelings about pretty much all of his films are positive.

Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori

To enter a Wes Anderson film is to enter a world that resembles our own in only the most superficial of ways, a hyperreality that plays by its own rules and is at once much flatter and much livelier than our own. You know a Wes Anderson film the second you lay eyes on it, because his visual style, the mathematical precision of his particular brand of whimsy, is so distinctly his own that it can belong to no one else. The director's latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is at once 100% in keeping with his work leading up to it, while at the same time being a significant departure. The Anderson hallmarks are all here, but despite the film's candy colored pallet, this is a much darker and more violent film than those that came before it. It's a film that's as mournful as it is funny, the pall of loss hanging over every scene but never dragging the film down.

Review: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray

"Family isn't a word... it's a sentence." Such was the tagline for Wes Anderson's 2001 gem The Royal Tenenbaums, a whimsical film about a toxic family that comes together after years of estrangement. Featuring a pitch perfect cast and arguably the most quotable screenplay of the first decade of this century, this instant classic is a movie you can watch again and again without it losing any of its luster.

Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray

"Quirk" doesn't always play well. Done inelegantly, it can come across as "cloying" rather than "charming." Wes Anderson is a master of quirky movies, a writer and director who always manages to find that delicate balance that keeps his projects from careening out of control and becoming annoyingly twee. Anderson is able to create stories and characters that are overtly artificial but that also feel "real" within the context of their own rules because Anderson creates living, breathing worlds in which to house those stories and characters. His latest, Moonrise Kingdom, is no exception and is definitely a contender for his best so far.