Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Steve Coogan, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Marianne Faithfull, Jamie Dornan, Aurore Clément, Tom Hardy. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Cinematography: Lance Acord. Production design: K.K. Barrett. Film editing: Sarah Flack. Costume design: Milena Canonero. Music: Dustin O'Halloran.

I fear that Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018) has spoiled the historical costume drama for me, even the ones that like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette take an irreverent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. Lanthimos deconstructed the genre in his film, while Coppola merely mocks it behind its back, lavishing the resources of costume and setting while setting up a few cognitive dissonances by using contemporary pop music in the background. Her courtiers sometimes behave more like spoiled rich kids than like 18th-century aristocrats, which is very much to the point she's making. I just wish she'd had the nerve to take it further, the way Lanthimos did. Still, it's full of grand eye candy with its luxurious scenes set at Versailles, and Kirsten Dunst is a charming performer. It's slightly overlong, even though it crams the fall of the aristos into a scant quarter of the film, never letting us glimpse a tumbril or a guillotine but instead mostly having the news of the revolution brought to us by messengers and summed up in a final shot of Marie's ruined bedroom après le déluge.

Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson, 2018)

Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson, 2018)

Cast voices: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Kunichi Nomura, Akira Takayama, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Akira Ito, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Yoko Ono, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Kunichi Nomura. Cinematography: Tristan Oliver. Production design: Paul Harrod, Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Edward Bursch, Ralph Foster, Andrew Weisblum. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim: Michael Cera
Ramona Flowers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Knives Chau: Ellen Wong
Kim Pine: Alison Pill
Stephen Stills: Mark Webber
Young Neil: Johnny Simmons
Wallace Wells: Kieran Culkin
Stacey Pilgrim: Anna Kendrick
Julie Powers: Aubrey Plaza
Matthew Patel: Satya Bhabha
Lucas Lee: Chris Evans
Envy Adams: Brie Larson
Roxy Richter: Mae Whitman
Todd Ingram: Brandon Routh
Gideon Graves: Jason Schwartzman

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Macliss

Edgar Wright's hyperactive but witty Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure, despite being an entertaining farrago of everything in 21st century pop culture: comic books, video games, anime, rock, superhero movies, and so on. Critics generally praised it, but that may have been something of a kiss of death, making it too mainstream for the hip. It has since, as such commercial misfires tend to do, become something of a cult movie, finding its audience as it ages and turns into a nostalgia piece. It gets much of its strength from Michael Cera's performance as the sweet slacker Scott, who plays bass in a garage band and has to balance an inappropriate infatuation with the underage Knives Chau and a more appropriate attraction to the très hip Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately, Ramona has a slate of evil ex-boyfriends, each of whom Scott is obliged to vanquish. Chris Evans and Brandon Routh send up their own superhero roles as two of the evil exes, the former a skateboarding movie star with an entourage of stunt doubles, the latter a bassist for a rival band who gets his superpowers from veganism -- about which he is willing to go on at hilarious length. Presiding over the evil exes is record producer Gideon Graves, sneeringly played by Jason Schwartzman. It's all very silly, but it's also bright and colorful fun if you want a break from reality.

Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014)

It's a great idea for a movie: the downfall of a hugely successful artist who took the credit for the work done by someone else. It allows a filmmaker to explore such topics as fraud, the difference between capital-A Art and works that are just popular, the nature of value when it comes to works of the imagination, and in this case, the relationship between men and women. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) persuaded his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams), to let him pass off her work -- paintings of large-eyed waifs -- as his own. The trouble with the movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to say about any of the important issues it raises, other than that Margaret Keane was a victim of the male-dominated society of the 1950s and '60s. It doesn't even settle on the issue of whether Margaret's paintings were mawkish kitsch or actual works of Art, though I think it rather smugly assumes that viewers will be smart enough to have decided on the former. But it complicates this position by starting with a quote from Andy Warhol proclaiming that the Keane art is "terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." And it turns the critics of Keane into pretentious snobs, represented by the gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman) who resents the fact that the Keane paintings outsell his rather arid, minimalist abstractions, and by John Canaday (Terence Stamp), the New York Times critic who prevents a Keane from being exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. So what we are left with is Margaret Keane, the victim who finally has the courage to turn against her monstrously manipulative husband and become a hero. That she is a hero in the cause of women's rights is presumably fine. But is it also fine that she becomes a hero by asserting her right to profit from making bad art? I don't think either screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski or director Tim Burton have decided for themselves. So we are left only with Adams's terrific performance as Margaret, which could have been bolstered by a fuller backstory, and Waltz's somewhat overdone performance as Walter. What Burton does best in his movies is milieu, especially when he can caricature it, which he does here, with a little more restraint than usual, in his portraits of the business of art in the 1960s. And he gets us into the head of Margaret Keane: When she is grinding out big-eyed paintings for Walter she goes to a supermarket and hallucinates the clerks and customers as big-eyed grotesques. But the movie probably should have gone more in one direction or another: Either into a realistic portrayal of the relationship of the Keanes or into a more vivid and surreal lampoon of the art world. Trying to do a bit of both undermines the film.

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

I didn't get Rushmore the first time I saw it, so I thought that, having seen most of Wes Anderson's subsequent films, it was time to revisit. And yes, I get it now. The problem is that it still leaves me a little cold. Part of my trouble with the movie lies with its central character, Max Fischer, who as played by Jason Schwartzman and written by Anderson and Owen Wilson begins as such an obnoxious twerp that it's hard to switch allegiance when the film eventually turns him into a sympathetic figure. It's difficult, too, to see why Olivia Williams's character, Miss Cross, puts up with him so long. My suspicion is that Williams didn't quite understand what Anderson and Wilson were going at with her part -- maybe she didn't get Rushmore either. As a result, we see her torn between two inappropriate suitors, Schwartzman and Bill Murray, but playing her part as a conventional romantic comedy heroine. Fortunately, everyone else in the cast, including such splendid actors as Seymour Cassel and Brian Cox, is completely into the loopy world that Anderson has created. There are those who think that in his later movies Anderson has either gone too cutesy or atrophied into a kind of zaniness for zaniness's sake, but I'm not one of them. I think he has learned how to superimpose his eccentric stories on the real world so that they work as the kind of satiric commentary that doesn't quite come off in Rushmore.