Maybe he isn’t interested in doing anything other than what he’s doing, and at some level that’s all the justification he needs. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. But I do think the cinematic world as a whole would benefit from him experimenting a little more, trying a novel format, and so on.
I am not sure what you mean, Asteroid City with its complex structure utilizing metafiction to explore things mostly removed from the characters and the story does not have much in common with The Royal Tenenbaums other than aesthetic with its fairly simple and direct use of character to explore the individual and family. Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?
There are more genres than action and superhero. A whole world of cinema, in fact. So it would be great if Anderson took his formidable skills and tried something new. A selfish request from a viewer, sure, but I just never feel like he’s trying to improve as a filmmaker and is merely doing what is comfortable to him.
Other than character development those are all part of the aesthetic and in his last two he mostly extended that aesthetic directly to the characters, dropped the essentially realistic relatable characters and turned them into caricatures who don't really develop; devices of the story and theme instead of what drives the story and develops theme. I would say he was doing things uncomfortable for him with The French Dispatch, which is why he did not quite pull off the meta aspect. I think his interests are in improving on story and narrative and exploring what can be done with them within the medium and his aesthetic is a means to those ends, a way to push things out of the normal perspectives and give him more room to do things like make highly metafictional films without going all out experimental.
I am perfectly aware there are other genres.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
But also, in a meta way, it wasn't a spoiler anyway because countdowns never reach zero anyway.
What I wouldn’t give to see Anderson tackle something really novel (for him). A period-piece tragedy; a college road trip; a horror film.
Sure, most people trivialise his "quirkiness" in annoying ways (there is depth and poetry in some of his movies that go beyond eye-pleasing symmetry) but the guy could take a risk or two, artistically speaking. His Fantastic Mr Fox was charming, and switching to animation is not at all easy for a live-action director!
There was nothing rhetorical about my question.
But his format is novel in the entire world of cinema right now, even if it doesn't change from film to film. People go to see a Wes Anderson film for the same reason Marvel fans line up for the next blockbuster; you know what you are going to get, and you want more of it. He takes it to the extreme in this one, where it works entirely visually as an almost homage to the days of silent film. We would benefit greatly from more filmmakers (and studios willing to take them on) who have such a defined aesthetic vision and are able to develop it over such a long a period, rather than just mashing together whatever expectations a focus group might have, or going off on flights of fancy that have little artistic continuity.
Complaining that Anderson movies feel like Anderson movies seems almost to miss the point: do we look at Picasso's works and complain about the consistent style he developed? The self-imposed constraints of his own style give him a framework to build his art from (it's often said that constraints foster creativity after all) and a particular craft to master.
Conversely, the form might always be an Anderson movie, but the function of each film can be quite different. By sticking with and mastering a particular aesthetic he frees himself to explore things besides aesthetic wildly. What does The Royal Tenenbaums have in common with, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel, besides Futura?
That said, I do feel like Asteroid City in particular was a stretch for him: there's nothing quite like "you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep" anywhere else in his filmography. It felt like along with the more extreme artifice came a more extreme intensity of feeling: to me it's a film that really came from a very anguished and grieving place. I haven't read the article or seen the new film yet, but based on the headline it sounds like this might be the overall direction his work is heading.
These are good examples to show how being an auteur doesn't mean you need to stick to the same stereotypical aesthetic. Anderson is still pretty young, so maybe he is shifting in one direction or another. But as far as his work goes as of today, the range of stylistic choices is far, far less than what Picasso or Godard did in their careers.
Asteroid City, for example, is doing something genuinely different, not just in tone, but in structure, layering fiction and grief in a way that feels disorienting and profound. And while his style is often imitated or parodied, nobody else is actually making movies like his with that particular blend of rigor, melancholy, humor, formality, and precision. We should celebrate having a unique voice and perspective, he's a major part of the diversity of creation, he's way outside the boiled-down average the rest of the industry pushes towards.
And certainly I’m glad he’s making movies and I enjoy them (as I said in the initial comment.) That doesn’t mean I need to celebrate every single thing he does and refrain from film criticism.
My point wasn’t that Anderson should be exempt from criticism, just that his growth may register differently because of the kind of storytelling he’s committed to. The evolution in his work often plays out less in surface-level aesthetics and more in structure, emotional depth, and thematic complexity. He clearly enjoys working within a consistent visual language, but that doesn’t mean he’s artistically “stuck”. Critique is always valid, and I think it’s also worth asking whether we’re tuned into the kinds of shifts that matter most in his particular creative vocabulary.
The departure in style, theme, visual approach, and structural vision between early works like Sleeper or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and later films such as Match Point is dramatic. Then again, three decades separate those movies. Anderson still has time.
Yes, but time for what? I still resist the implication that Anderson is somehow “sitting still” artistically just because he maintains a consistent (and remarkable, and unique) aesthetic. When you engage with his work beyond the surface, there’s clear evolution in structure, tone, emotional depth, and thematic ambition. That doesn't mean everything he's done is a masterpiece, or that not liking it is somehow an invalid critique.
He may still evolve in more outwardly dramatic ways, but I think he has and continue to evolve already, just on his own terms, without compromising the visual language he clearly loves.
As a film director with such a distinct style, which makes money, it would be pretty hard to go to your investors and say 'I want to do something totally different.' and secure enough money to make a film in the modern era. There are some directors who can self fund due to windfalls in the past. I mean thinking back on noted auteurs I can only think of a film or two that are outside of their style and most are either very early in their career when maybe they were doing a work for hire or very late in their career where they had enough gravitas to get the money to try something different that they had been sitting on for many years (David Lynch's Straight Story is a bit of an odd man out though, I'm not sure of the history of that particular film)
But for someone like picasso, he can just decide on even a whim to attempt to refine or invent another style, the market probably has some kind of pull but it seems like, to me, several orders of magnitude lower stakes.
It would be interesting to find out after some film auteurs' death that they actually had done several other films in a wildly different style under whatever the director's equivalent of a pen name is. Though keeping such a thing secret would be highly improbable (too many people involved in a modern film production).
Anderson nonetheless is still quite inventive and experimental in his films, he's always doing new things, and usually those new things are in the details, and of course, those new things tend to play into his trademark style. Asteroid City played like an excuse to play around with clever camera movements. Isle of Dogs did weird things where the image and sound were providing diverging narratives that would come back together.
Anderson's trademark style is annoying to me only when my interest in the characters and story is lacklustre, but for every Anderson film I'm not that into I know at least one person who loves it.
I think it would be unreasonable to expect him to reinvent his filmmaking style dramatically. There are other filmmakers out there making movies for those who've had their fill of quirky Wes Anderson flicks.
This being a Wes Anderson film, I expect at the very least an introductory chapter heading and title card for each character.
They might or might not have argued for two months about the individual fonts to pick for each card, before eventually settling on hiring a font designer (one per character).
Hope this one is a bit more exciting.
Rushmore is my favorite. The yearbook montage is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMyh6ptegko
I haven't seen The Phoenician Scheme, but if it changes that then it's a positive sign.
Fun fact: Rushmore was shot in an era without social media. All my film nerd pals were aware of Anderson after Bottle Rocket, and were tacitly awaiting his next film, but its ultimate arrival was a surprise. Even MORE surprising (at least for us) was that it was shot right here in Houston -- recognizably, obviously Houston. (I'm sure the St John's community was aware... )
Its release also solved a puzzle for my friend E. and I dating from the winter of 97-98. We'd stopped for sushi at a middling but reasonably priced joint between our rental house the bar we were headed to, and after posting up at the corner of the sushi counter and ordering a bit, we noticed the guy at the far end of the bar. He had a sort of admiring entourage with him of 2-3 younger folks.
The guy looked familiar, but we couldn't place him. Finally:
"Wow, that guy looks like Bill Murray."
"Yeah, he really does, doesn't he?"
"I think that might actually BE Bill Murray."
"What the hell is he doing in Houston?"
"No idea. Is there a tournament at the River Oaks club?"
We ate. We left. We forgot about seeing him -- until we saw Rushmore the following fall.
(In the unlikely event someone reading this knows Houston: this was at the Miyako that used to be just north of 59 on the west side of Kirby, so close to River Oaks.)
I found Asteroid City to be one of his most emotionally raw films. Beneath the precise framing and deadpan delivery that characterizes his work, the movie is wrestling with true grief, uncertainty, and the need to keep performing your role (in life, and in a metafiction sense, in the movie). This driving need is there even and perhaps especially when you don’t "understand the script", and when you feel isolated and other-ed.
The scene with Margot Robbie is the fulcrum of the entire movie, it’s brief, but devastating, and probably the most emotionally exposed Anderson has ever gotten. I think this scene is also in part in dialogue with the audience. If you ever do revisit it, I think there’s a lot simmering under the surface worth your time. But it's not my intention to try and convince someone to enjoy a movie that doesn't click for them.
All the commenters in here complaining that new Wes doesn't have what old Wes had.. Maybe they're missing what new Wes is doing? The newer movies are full of emotion, they're not monotone at all.
Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.
However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).
Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)
"Flow" was a huge disappointment for me. I couldn't get past the animation jerkiness and overall unrealistic look. I have two cats, and cats simply don't move like pictured: while most of the keyframes were perfectly fine, the transitions between them were off, which completely broke it for me. Heck, "Stray" (the video game) had much more realistically moving cat than "Flow" and I think it's supposed to be the other way around. I get that it was "indie" stuff done on a relatively small budget, but those broken movements became sort of an uncanny valley for me.
I guess, I also had wrong expectations from the beginning. The movie was heavily advertised as non-verbal, so - naturally - I expected it to portray the behaviors of non-human consciousness (with slight allowances for plot reasons, sure). And then the animals behaved as if they were unquestionably and heavily anthropopsychic.
To sum it up, "animals don't move like this and don't behave like this" paired with some invalid pre-expectations, sadly, was too much to break my suspension of disbelief and ruin the movie for me.
But yeah, it's certainly not a "mindless banter in between sex and explosions".
I think Flow is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years, in part because of how it chooses to depart from reality.
I think it also helped that I saw it in a theater which I find far more immersive than watching at home.
Fantastic Mr. Fox Rushmore Royal Tenenbaums Life Aquatic
The rest, I don't really care for, nothing new, just flash, no substance, and have stopped watching his new movies.
In Budapest, French and Asteroid it felt increasingly like the actors were too confined to fulfilling an aesthetic for them to come alive or for the actors to shine.
Apologies in advance for sounding controversially critical, I can't help but be reminded of AI art where its trying so hard to look a way that it stops being something you want to look at.
He was going through some major depression and understandably pulled back from the industry. But he brought something very personable and authentic to comedy, and his absence has been palpable.
Many other comedians of the era were too slapstick and over the top for me. I still can't watch a Will Ferrell comedy with any interest.
Ferrell... Massive comedic turn off for me. He seems like the guy that jumps into a room, interrupts and yells out a joke out of context, then keeps repeating it louder and louder until some polite fake laughter occurs. I feel bad about being this negative about a fellow human being, but his comedic approach sets off a Bully vibe / response in me in anything I've seen him in except Stranger Than Fiction.
He needs to go to Siberia and relearn what made him great.
The Roald Dahl short stories on Netflix were very dysfunctional but so obviously in the spirit and tone of Roald Dahl that I thought they were actually very faithful to his writing, I think Wes Anderson did a rare thing in transliterating those stories to screen, the good and the flaws in tone are directly from Roald Dahl who I really enjoyed as a kid because the absurd and ironic detachment, the odd meanness of spirit, was rare in childrens books at the time (maybe still is, idk). I didn't enjoy them as film but I did enjoy their faithfulness to the authors work.
Dispatches felt like basically Wes Anderson explaining his own personal feelings of his life, being an ex-pat enamored but disconnected from his new home country, I could be wrong but it felt like it was the closest he'll ever have to an autobiography. It was effectively a short story format as well. I mean the guy went from being a Texas rube / self manufactured dandy dreaming of exotic locations through the lens of the fucking new yorker (what a weirdo right?) to living in Paris, what an odd personal life arc, the film felt like it was all exploring that. As someone who has lived in these kinds of personal cultural displacements and unexpected life arcs it felt very obvious, and I really enjoyed that part. This could all be projection of course.
I don't know, I wonder if he has the pathos required for long form any more, maybe he is just bored with the traditional arcs they require (I'm getting older and it's very easy to get bored of any consumptive activity) but he can't really seem to find his footing on short stories either. Maybe he's happy and resolved trauma and can't speak to it in that subtly authentic way anymore. I loved Life Aquatic, I loved the exploration of an unsympathetic main character who didn't want to realize why he had become unsympathetic, I already loved Seu Jorge and so the soundtrack is perfection to me as well.
A great way to describe it, unfortunately. I love Wes Anderson movies, but my patience with Asteroid City ran out when the (spoiler alert) quirky-looking stop-motion alien landed.
If Wes made No Country For Old Men in this style it would suck.
The films look incredible but the monotone delivery and lack of soundtrack remove any drama and intrigue.
I say this as someone that loved Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic
I genuinely don't understand what this means, No Country for Old Men is a Coen Brothers movie.
Do I need to see "The Phoenician Scheme" to understand this reference...?
I see No Country For Old Men as one of the top films of the last 20 years, what with its pacing and the atmosphere they create. It's not an original story, based on a book, so therefore any director could have been brought on board.
You might say I am comparing apples to oranges but it was just a way to illustrate what I think the problem is.
For example, what if the Coen brothers had directed, say, 'Adaptation'? It would have been a completely different film. Would we ever want to see Christopher Nolan adapt Stefan Zweig? Hardly.
If Wes made No Country for Old Men it would be another movie, just like if Martin Scorcese would have done it...
At some point he may use real wooden puppets like the 1960s TV series Thunderbirds, which looks very Wes Andersonesque: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLiH4xrCITI
After those, his own movies have almost become caricatures of an Anderson film and the characters have become so much like clockwork that they might as well be set pieces themselves.
The one later exception I can think of, off the top of my head was Ralph Fiennes in Hotel Budapest. His character, and the actor himself in how he plays him, are just too zesty to stay wooden.
I think this is a feature of his artistic refinement through the years; he's the last true visual storyteller in Hollywood. Actors don't really matter, scripts don't really matter - it's a treat for the eyes alone. Something really was lost in the transition from silent to "talkies" where the focus became entirely on plot and dialogue. If you go back and watch those films now, the very best of them had almost no dialogue or title cards. I'd liken what he is doing to something like Joyce in literature, where it's not even about the words, but their semantic structures alone. It seems that all visionary artists end up going in this direction, see Picasso in his later years of total abstraction, or Schoenberg's final works that completely abandoned tonality.
That being said, I actually think his style of late has its place. At least he is trying something different in a time when most movies are so derivative and bum-numbingly boring that I rarely bother seeing a movie in a movie-theater. There is a rarity of interesting outliers in mainstream film today.
Outliers are good. They are not wayward miscreants that must be herded back into mediocrity lest we have to think.
It isn't like I'm a snob who only watches art films. I used to watch almost everything that hit the big screen, and I'd enjoy the whole range from hard-to-grasp, arty farty stuff most people think is boring/demanding/ugly/confusing to blatantly commercial nonsense ... that was nonetheless entertaining and fun. (I'd make my proto-hipster friends cringe with my love of B-movies). I had to empty my wallet of ticket stubs regularly so it wouldn't burst the seams.
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