Another in a long line of Wes Anderson's odes to mischievous schemers and/or fractured families. Korda is brash, ruthless, shallow and yet, there's a core of humanity there that Del Toro allows us to see and which animates the entire plot with the arrival of his daughter, who works to lay it bare.

This is the entire emotional gambit of a Wes Anderson film. As his performers are increasingly burying tics and tells in favor of a rapid-free deadpan delivery,…

GREAT movie.

It’s incredibly funny—laughed every single time del Toro offered someone a hand grenade—and eventually tender in that Anderson way.

Fascinating how politics have seeped into Anderson’s films, which used to feel more of their time stylistically, and now feel stylistically apart, but also more reflective of the contemporary world. If Anderson has retreated into a dollhouse style, which even I’ve been bumping up against of late, he’s done it while opening his films up to the idea that…

Surprised by how much this worked for me seeing as how I’ve hated Anderson’s output for more than a decade, but wry cynicism with a hint of spiritual crisis is a much better fit for late stage Andersonian faff than whatever the hell was going on with Asteroid City last year. Phoenician is stoned and low stakes, a wistful “haw-haw-haw, oh how cute” tribute to Godard-the-Maoist and love letter to the Safari Club that understands that every one of the…

Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda is as perfect a role for Benicio Del Toro as M. Gustave was for Ralph Fiennes, making brilliant use of his imposing physicality, gruff demeanor and wry comic timing. But it's the shared gravitas between him and Mia Threapleton's Liesl that centers this film. Threapleton has an assured, ascetic delivery that feels at home in Anderson's landscape while adding a new rhythm to it. Their striking dynamic playing Korda's worldly bravado off of Liesl's wary piety crystallizes…

a quarter century ago, tom cruise found new depths as an actor magnifying the cracks in the veneer of his celebrity, revealing things human, sometimes bracing in their confessional vulnerability, their willingness to repel. working alongside auteurs like paul thomas anderson, stanley kubrick, and (yes) cameron crowe, cruise laundered personal familial traumas, psychosexual anxieties, fears of aging, death, relegation to obscurity, into these works and into era defining performances still regarded as one of the richest periods in the actor's…