Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
The staff of an American magazine based in France puts out its last issue, with stories featuring an artist sentenced to life imprisonment, student riots, and a kidnapping resolved by a chef.
Wes Anderson's anthology love letter to The New Yorker is among his most visually extravagant and stylistically singular works — the cinematography is breathtaking, oscillating between black-and-white and color, wide-angle compositions, and meticulous tableaux that are unmistakably his own. The ensemble cast (Brody, Swinton, Ejiofor, Chalamet, Yeoman, McDormand, and more) delivers precisely calibrated performances that suit the mannered world Anderson constructs. Novelty is high: while distinctly Andersonian, the anthology structure applied to journalism homage feels genuinely distinctive even within his filmography. The plot, however, is deliberately fragmented — each vignette works to varying degrees, with some feeling more accomplished than others, making the overall narrative satisfaction inconsistent. The ending, a quiet obituary-framed coda, is emotionally sincere but lacks the resonant punch that might have unified the anthology's disparate threads, leaving many viewers feeling the film ends with a whimper rather than a meaningful close.