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In a 2019 interview with Charente Libre , Wes Anderson said that his new movie, "The French Dispatch" was "not easy to explain." He's right, it's not, and any explanation would deconstruct it in a way to make it sound even more incomprehensible. It's like taking apart a clock to see how it works, and in so doing you no longer know what time it is. A clock is an apt metaphor for Anderson's style, present in all of his movies, but to an extreme degree here. Made up of a dizzying array of whirring intersecting teeny tiny parts, "The French Dispatch" ticks forward relentlessly, never stopping to breathe, barely pausing for reflection. "The French Dispatch" lacks some of the more endearing qualities of his earlier features—the prep school shenanigans of " Rushmore ," the intimate family dynamic of " The Royal Tenenbaums " and " The Darjeeling Limited ," or the kid-centered " Moonrise Kingdom ." By contrast, "The French Dispatch" holds the audience at a remove, and is a stronger film for it. Watching Anderson follow his obsession to the outer limits (it's hard to imagine how much further he could go) is fascinating. The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

In "The French Dispatch," the object of Anderson's obsession ("object" is a key word) is The New Yorker , specifically The New Yorker  in the time of finicky founder/editor Harold Ross, and his daunting roster of writers— James Thurber , A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Rosamond Bernier, James Baldwin —all of whom were given enormous leeway in terms of subject matter and process, but edited within an inch of their lives to align their prose with the aggressive New Yorker  house style.

The fictionalized New Yorker  is called The French Dispatch , published out of a little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, although it started in Liberty, Kansas, where editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. ( Bill Murray ) was born and raised. (In one of the many "A-ha" moments of trivia sprinkled throughout: the magazine was originally called Picnic . Playwright William Inge , most famous for his 1953 play Picnic , was born in Independence, Kansas. Liberty, Independence, get it? None of this means anything, but it's fun if you pick up on it.) Howitzer is surrounded by a loyal staff overseeing a collective of eccentric writers, all busy at work completing pieces for the upcoming issue. "The French Dispatch" doesn't delve into these characters' lives but instead focuses on their work, and the movie's structure is that of an issue of the magazine, where you literally step into the pages, and "read" three separate stories. But first, there is the Jacques-Tati-style opening sequence, clearly a riff on The New Yorker  staple, "The Talk of the Town," with Herbsaint Sazerac ( Owen Wilson , jaunty in a black beret and turtleneck) bicycling through Ennui-sur-Blasé, showing us the sights (and speaking directly to the camera, causing some unfortunate collisions).

The first magazine story centers on Moses Rosenthaler ( Benicio Del Toro ), a genius artist serving a life sentence for homicide, and engaged in a love affair with Simone ( Léa Seydoux ), his muse, promoter, and prison guard. Adrien Brody plays Julian Cadazio, Moses' representation in the hifalutin' art world, wheeling and dealing to get Moses' work out there. The second story is a whimsical pantomime of the 1968 student protests in Paris, presented in Godardian pastiche, with Timothée Chalamet as Zeffirelli, a moody revolutionary (is there any other kind?), and Frances McDormand as Lucinda Krementz, the French Dispatch writer whose objectivity is compromised when she inserts herself into the story. (This section is clearly inspired by Mavis Gallant's 1968 coverage of the protests for The New Yorker , "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook".) The final story shows the attempt by writer Roebuck Wright ( Jeffrey Wright )—a mashup of James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling (with a little M.F.K. Fisher thrown in)—to profile a legendary chef named Nescaffier ( Steve Park ), who works his magic in the police department kitchen. Each story is told with its own style, with Anderson utilizing animation, graphics, still lifes, visual puns, and gags, all held together by the thread of Alexandre Desplat's score, and Anderson's single-minded sense of mission.

Very few filmmakers have as distinct a fingerprint as Wes Anderson. (There's an entire book called Accidentally Wes Anderson , made up of photographs from around the world of buildings and landscapes that look like Anderson shots.) There are two things that obsess him: objects and nostalgia. Prosaic everyday objects transform in the context of Anderson's miniaturized diorama world. He views objects the way the artist Joseph Cornell viewed them. Cornell was an obsessive collector of what was deemed "junk" (marbles, old maps, tiny glass jars), junk which turned into magical talismans when placed in his now-world-famous boxes. Cornell's fetishism is apparent in his work, making it all slightly unnerving in really beautiful ways. There's a fine line between obsession and fetishism, but in art that fine line doesn't much matter. Anderson's objects glow from his detailed attention: he cares about each and every one of them. A line from The Picture of Dorian Gray  comes to mind: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." Anderson perceives the mystery in the visible.

Anderson's obsession with objects has to do with his other obsession of nostalgia. Nostalgia is universal, but it is also tricky. What one person yearns for in the past may be someone else's nightmare (and vice versa). In a cliched film, nostalgia expresses itself in a golden glow (assumed to be universal). Anderson's nostalgia isn't like that. His is extremely specific. There's a reason some people find his work alienating. You're in the presence of a true obsessive, that's why. For example, if you don't yearn to live inside J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey , then you won't easily enter into Anderson's dreamspace. The same is true of "The French Dispatch." What is most interesting about this, though, is that Anderson is nostalgic for things that pre-date his own life. He is nostalgic for fictional worlds, for objects now considered obsolete, for rhythms of a long-ago time he didn't even experience. This is not to say his nostalgia is not personal. It is. Another quote, this time from Nancy Lemann's eccentric novel The Fiery Pantheon : "She had a nostalgia for a life she had never lived."

This is not so much what "The French Dispatch" is about, as what it made me think  about. It's strange that such a crowded, dazzling, visually-insistent film leaves so much space for free association, but it does. Now that's  endearing.

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Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The French Dispatch (2021)

Rated R for graphic nudity, some sexual references and language.

108 minutes

Bill Murray as Arthur Howitzer, Jr.

Benicio Del Toro as Moses Rosenthaler

Frances McDormand as Lucinda Krementz

Jeffrey Wright as Roebuck Wright

Adrien Brody as Julian Cadazio

Tilda Swinton as J. K. L. Berensen

Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac

Timothée Chalamet as Zeffirelli

Léa Seydoux as Simone

Mathieu Amalric as Le Commissaire

Lyna Khoudri as Juliette

Steve Park as Nescaffier

Liev Schreiber as T.V. Host

Elisabeth Moss as Alumna

Edward Norton as The Chauffeur

Willem Dafoe as Albert 'The Abacus'

Lois Smith as Upshur 'Maw' Clampette

Saoirse Ronan as Principal Showgirl

Christoph Waltz as Paul Duval

Cécile De France as Mrs. B

Guillaume Gallienne as Mr. B

Jason Schwartzman as Hermès Jones

Tony Revolori as Young Rosenthaler

Rupert Friend as Drill-Sergeant

Henry Winkler as Uncle Joe

Bob Balaban as Uncle Nick

Hippolyte Girardot as Chou-fleur

Anjelica Huston as The Narrator (voice)

Denis Ménochet as Prison Guard

• Wes Anderson

Writer (story by)

• Roman Coppola
• Hugo Guinness
• Jason Schwartzman

Cinematographer

• Robert Yeoman
• Andrew Weisblum
• Alexandre Desplat

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“The French Dispatch,” Reviewed: Wes Anderson’s Most Freewheeling Film

“The French Dispatch” should finally dispel a common misgiving about the movies of Wes Anderson—namely, that there is something enervated, static, or precious about the extremes of the decorative artifice of which his comedy is made. “The French Dispatch” is perhaps Anderson’s best film to date. It is certainly his most accomplished. And, for all its whimsical humor, it is an action film, a great one, although Anderson’s way of displaying action is unlike that of any other filmmaker. His movies often rest upon an apparent paradox between the refinement of his methods and the violence of his subject matter. In “The French Dispatch,” it is all the more central, given his literary focus: the title is also the name of a fictitious magazine that’s explicitly modelled on The New Yorker and some of its classic journalistic stars. Anderson sends writers out in search of stories, and what they find turns out to be a world of trouble, a world in which aesthetics and power are inseparable, with all the moral complications and ambivalences that this intersection entails.

Anderson’s fictional publication operates between 1925, the year of its founding by Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), and 1975, the year of Howitzer’s death and (by his testamentary decree) the magazine’s as well. Unlike The New Yorker, The French Dispatch is based in France, in the made-up town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, where young Howitzer decided to prolong a vacation more or less forever by transforming the Sunday supplement of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun —a newspaper owned by his father—into a travelogue that soon morphed into a literary sensation. The movie takes the form of the magazine’s final issue, which features Howitzer’s obituary; a brief travelogue by a writer named Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), which shows, in a thumbnail sketch, how the publication’s tone and substance has evolved; and three long feature articles. The features, each running about a half hour, catch the grand preoccupations and varied subjects of the magazine’s writers, and the combination of style and substance that marks their literary work—and Anderson’s cinema.

“The French Dispatch” contains an overwhelming and sumptuous profusion of details. This is true of its décor and costumes, its variety of narrative forms and techniques (live action, animation, split screens, flashbacks, and leaps ahead, among many others), its playful breaking of the dramatic frame with reflexive gestures and conspicuous stagecraft, its aphoristic and whiz-bang dialogue, and the range of its performances, which veer in a heartbeat from the outlandishly facetious to the painfully candid. Far from being an inert candy box or display case, the movie bursts and leaps with a sense of immediacy and impulsivity; the script (which Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman) bubbles over with the sense of joy found in discovery and invention. Even its static elements are set awhirl—actions and dialogue performed straight into the camera, scenes of people sitting at tables joined with rapid and rhythmically off-kilter editing, tableaux vivants that freeze scenes of turmoil into contemplative wonders—and take flight by way of a briskly moving camera.

For all its meticulous preparation, the movie swings, spontaneous, unhinged, and it’s precisely this sensory and intellectual overload that gives rise to the misperception that it is static, fussy, tight. On first viewing, audience members run the risk of having their perceptual circuits shorted. The effort even to make sense of what’s going on—to parse the action into its constituent elements, to assemble its narratives, its moods, and its ideas—leads to inevitable oversimplifications, the reduction of roiling cinematic energy into mere mental snapshots. In my mind, it’s necessary to see “The French Dispatch” twice in order to see it fully even once, which I mean as a high artistic compliment. I felt the same way about “ Fantastic Mr. Fox ,” in part because of the microcosmic details that each frame of the film exuded, and “The French Dispatch” is by far the richer movie. Anderson’s convergence of multiple narrative frames into a single scene of action, his leaping about in time and space to provide different perspectives, and his nested and frame-breaking modes of storytelling are all so daringly complex that, by comparison, they make Alain Resnais seem like Sidney Lumet.

The simplest of the film’s stories is Sazerac’s introductory sketch of Ennui, in which the roving reporter—speaking his story into the camera while zipping through the town on his bike—dispels the idea of an enticing and picturesque travelogue by considering the town’s pickpockets, sex workers, predatory choirboys, its poor and unfulfilled. His inquisitively unstinting view of the town (involving bodies fished from the river Blasé) also involves his own kinds of trouble, whether it’s falling into a manhole or being pulled off his bike by young miscreants—a pair of gags that Anderson realizes with exquisite comedic minimalism and lead to Sazerac repairing his bike while in story conference with Howitzer.

The art critic and historian J. K. L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) tells the first feature story, of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), an artist and a psychopath who becomes world-famous while incarcerated for murder in a high-security prison in Ennui. Rosenthaler owes his career to a prison guard named Simone (Léa Seydoux), who is an unconventional muse: she poses for him and is his lover but is also his virtual boss and actual commander. Upon getting an inkling of his great talent—and feeling the spark of connection between them—she takes him and his career firmly and sternly in hand, for her own long-term purposes. (The relationship is intensely erotic, on terms that Simone strictly dictates.) Rosenthaler also owes his acclaim to an art dealer named Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), a fellow-inmate, convicted of tax fraud, who recruits Rosenthaler for his gallery and then manages to bring a major collector—Upshur (Maw) Clampette (Lois Smith), from Liberty, Kansas, and her entourage (including Berensen, who once worked for her as a consultant)—to the prison for a show that turns mortally chaotic.

Next, the political correspondent Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) reports on a student uprising in Ennui, undated but clearly modelled on the events in Paris in May, 1968. The leader of the students, Zeffirelli B. (Timothée Chalamet), is at the forefront of a demand that young men be allowed into women’s dormitories. (Something of the sort actually happened as a crucial prelude to the May events.) Krementz, who dines with Zeffirelli’s parents, finds him in the bathtub writing a manifesto while the police are breaking up demonstrations with tear gas. She helps with his manifesto and they become lovers, but their relationship sparks conflict between the blithe, rock-music-loving Zeffirelli and another student leader, Juliette (Lyna Khoudri), an intensely earnest hard-core ideologue. (There’s a key debate over the concept of journalistic objectivity that reveals Krementz’s fluid, participatory sense of journalism.) A standoff with the police that’s being resolved by a chess game between Zeffirelli and the commissioner devolves into a police riot. Ultimately, the students’ cause, as Krementz reports it, both “obliterated a thousand years of republican authority in less than a fortnight” and gave rise to millions of posters and T-shirts depicting the rebels’ “likeness.”

The last feature, by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), is the most hyperbolically artificial of the three, and also the most sharply poignant. Wright is a Black homosexual American author who chose exile in Ennui. He became a food writer, and his report here is centered on Lieutenant Nescaffier (Steve Park), the greatest chef of police cuisine, an idiosyncratic specialty that Wright parses in detail and that plants him at the table of the Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric). The meal is meant to be a delight but turns into a violent nightmare when, days after a horrific gang war, the Commissaire’s young son, Gigi (Winsen Ait Hellal), is kidnapped and the entire department is mobilized to locate and rescue the boy. Wright tells his story from the stage of a TV talk show (the host is played by Liev Schreiber, with a brilliant deadpan reserve), where he proves his “typographic memory” by reciting his article verbatim. It then gets dramatized onscreen, with Wright talking to the camera as the events unfold. Yet the story that Wright tells—about crimes committed by gangsters, about crimes of horrific brutality committed by police officers, about daring rescues at great personal sacrifice—is also a personal one, involving repressions and persecutions endured by homosexuals (on the charge, as he puts it, that they “love the wrong way”), and one of the struggle of exile. It becomes all the more personal when he’s asked by the talk-show host to explain his decision to write about food, and when he discusses with Nescaffier (who’s an immigrant of Asian ethnicity) the political uneasiness of their lives in exile.

All of these stories are realized with dazzling stagecraft and ingenious artifice, starting, most simply, with frequent switches back and forth between the use of black-and-white and color. Rosenthaler in his youth is played by Tony Revolori—and, when he hits his eleventh year in prison, he’s played by Del Toro, who enters the frame, bids Revolori farewell, and, after removing Rosenthaler’s I.D. badge from around the other actor’s neck, puts it on and takes his place onscreen. In the Café Le Sans Blague, in Ennui, where the student protesters hang out, the building’s façade slides away to reveal the activities of its up-in-arms customers—and, the second time a façade slides out, Anderson shows a workman pushing it offscreen. A flash forward shows the performance of a play about the military service of Zeffirelli’s deserter friend Mitch-Mitch (Mohamed Belhadjine)—a staging that’s both droll and physically impossible. What’s more, Anderson adds effervescent cinephilic winks to the action, high and low: Juliette and Zeffirelli seemingly ride off together into a French sunset on her scooter, in images of an exaltedly rhapsodic, abstracted isolation from the setting, reminiscent of those from Leos Carax’s “Mauvais Sang.” Howitzer’s first French Dispatch office is on the fifth floor of a building matching one from Jacques Tati’s “ Mon Oncle .” The police hunt for Gigi leads to a colossal chase scene rendered in a starkly vivid animation style reminiscent of the giddily threadbare “ Dick Tracy Show ” cartoons.

Anderson approaches serious matters not by displaying the authentic pain that they entail but, rather, by letting it ricochet off other, related subjects—he arouses emotion more than he displays it, and, in the process, associates ideas to the feelings. His sense of extreme artifice allows him to bring together, into salient relationship, subjects that belong together, whether or not they’re often found together in real life as clearly and blatantly as in his films. His views of society’s turbulence, individuals’ violence, and institutions’ cruelty are inseparable from the sense of style that heroic resisters bring to it—and that group includes both the people who confront crushing power and those who report on it. (They’re sometimes the same people.) “The French Dispatch” is filled with the practical aesthetics of clothing, architecture, furniture, food, design, and discourse; it’s also filled with beautiful deeds and sublime gestures, steadfast love and physical courage, amid hostile conditions. There’s a long-familiar tradition in film of refinement meshing with evil, as with the epicurean sadism of movie Nazis and arch-criminals. It’s a demagogic trope that comforts viewers who presume that, conversely, their ordinary tastes must be a sign of their ordinary decency, too. But Anderson understands that the refinement of style can be a way of outwardly facing down the power of the world with one’s inner personal imperatives. Like such artists as Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks, he brings together the beauty of heroism and the heroism of beauty. In a sublime gesture of his own, he celebrates not only unsung heroes and those who tell their stories but also those who, like Howitzer and his staff of grammarians and illustrators, provide an accompaniment as stylish and as substantial as the adventures and inventions themselves.

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Movie review: 'The French Dispatch'

Scott Detrow

Glen Weldon

Bedatri D. Choudhury

Watching The French Dispatch is like seeing an issue of The New Yorker come to life. Wes Anderson's new film is based on articles of a fictional magazine published in a fictional city in France.

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Wes anderson’s ‘the french dispatch’: film review | cannes 2021.

Bill Murray plays the editor of a fictitious American magazine in a quaint French town, whose staff assembles to prepare their final issue in this valentine to literary journalism co-starring Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Wes Anderson pens an extravagant love letter to the adventurous editors of sophisticated literary magazines like The New Yorker , and to the writers, humorists and illustrators nurtured up through their ranks, in The French Dispatch . Bursting at the seams with hand-crafted visual delights and eccentric performances from a stacked ensemble entirely attuned to the writer-director’s signature wavelength, this is the film equivalent of a short story collection. That makes it episodic by nature and less nourishing in narrative terms than some of Anderson’s through-line features. But the Searchlight release is a beguiling curio, and one that no other filmmaker could have created.

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The decision to keep the movie on hold for a year from its original premiere slot after the cancellation of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival makes perfect sense given its playful celebration of all things French, not least of them French cinema. Anderson acknowledges a long list of influences, among the most conspicuous of them the beatnik hipsterism of nouvelle vague-period Godard, the youthful rebellion and romantic rapture of Truffaut, the social satire of Renoir and the slapstick of Tati. While the musicals of Jacques Demy are not mentioned, those are also evoked in the ravishing color palette.

The French Dispatch

Opens : Friday, Oct. 22 Venue : Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Cast : Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston Director-screenwriter : Wes Anderson; story by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman

Audiences who in the past have found Anderson’s work precious and overly mannered are unlikely to alter that view, and it wouldn’t be surprising if some accuse the new film of veering almost into self-parody. But others who have savored their excursions into the director’s richly imagined, idiosyncratic worlds will marvel at the wonders of Adam Stockhausen’s production design, with its ingenious sets and miniatures and models, which transform the ancient Roman southwestern town of Angoulême into the whimsically named fictional locale of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The setting is no less elaborate a confection and each frame no less packed with artisanal detail than those of The Grand Budapest Hotel , arguably The French Dispatch ’s closest kin among Anderson’s previous films.

Continuing his affection for narrative boxes-within-boxes, Anderson structures the movie as an obituary, a travel column and three feature articles, all appearing in the final issue of the widely read magazine that provides the title. The obituary is for Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), the founding editor of The French Dispatch , who left his native Kansas 50 years earlier and spent decades assembling a talented team of expat journalists. Inspired by legendary New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, Howitzer is an avuncular figure but also a hard taskmaster in Murray’s typically deadpan performance. The “No Crying” sign hanging above his office door indicates his tolerance for sentiment, while the Issue-in-Progress board laying out the various articles and illustrations vying for space could almost be one of Anderson’s own storyboards. Howitzer’s will stipulates that the magazine will cease publication upon his death.

The travel column is written by “cycling reporter” Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who tools around town on his bike, drolly commenting on a day in the life of Ennui. Given a visual assist with split-screen and inventive wipes, he guides us through the past, present and future of various corners, and surveys colorful locals like the streetwalkers and gigolos who gather on the cobblestones after dark. His study covers the rats that colonize the underground tunnels, the cats that congregate on the rooftops and the wriggly anguillettes that live in the canals.

The first of the features is The Concrete Masterpiece , written by art correspondent J.K.L. Berensen, who frames the piece as a lecture at a Kansas arts center. Tilda Swinton, who never met an outré disguise she didn’t like, looks every inch the part, outfitted by costumer Milena Canonero in deliciously garish upscale boho-chic, with a swooping matronly coiffure, a heap of power jewelry and a toothy dental plate. Berensen relishes every salacious detail, particularly the hints of her own intimate associations with the modern art world.

Her story centers on Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), a growling sociopath serving time for a double homicide in the Ennui Prison/Asylum. In the hobby room, he begins painting a series of nudes of his muse, taciturn prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux), which spark the interest of art dealer Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody) while he’s in jail for tax evasion. Upon his release, Cadazio and his uncles (Bob Balaban and Henry Winkler) begin promoting Rosenthaler’s work, stoking the market until prominent buyers are drawn from far and wide to the surprising unveiling of his magnum opus, including renowned Kansas collector Upshur “Maw” Clampette (Lois Smith). It seems an unlikely reference, but could Anderson be riffing on The Beverly Hillbillies with that name?

Next up is Revisions to a Manifesto , Anderson’s characteristically screwy take on France’s May 1968 protests, written by stoical essayist Lucinda Krementz ( Frances McDormand ). While alternately guarding and disregarding the virtues of journalistic neutrality, she takes up with the student revolutionaries busy overthrowing centuries of Republican authority — or just demanding access to the girls’ dormitory. Chief among them is impassioned chess master Zeffirelli ( Timothée Chalamet ), whose momentary distraction with the worldly Lucinda doesn’t quite obscure his antagonistic mutual attraction with fellow zealot Juliette (Lyna Khoudri).

The third and knottiest feature is The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner , by food writer Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright as a dandified James Baldwin. The frame this time is a TV chat show interview conducted by Liev Schreiber. Roebuck explains how his profile of Lieutenant Nescaffier (Stephen Park), the gifted personal chef to the municipal police commissaire (Mathieu Amalric), spiraled into chaos. This happened when a gang of thugs and showgirls (Saoirse Ronan memorable among them) abducted the commissaire’s son and protégé (Winston Ait Hellal), demanding the release of the underworld accountant known as The Abacus (Willem Dafoe).

Inspired physical comedy figures throughout the film but reaches particularly giddy heights in this section, which features gorgeous animated escape sequences in a bandes dessinées style reminiscent of Belgian cartoonist Hergé, creator of The Adventures of Tintin , while also evoking classic New Yorker covers.

The “end note” is the writing of Howitzer’s obituary, which becomes a collaborative effort involving the entire staff. That includes the mathematically minded copy editor (Elisabeth Moss) and the cartoonist (Jason Schwartzman, who developed the story with Anderson, Roman Coppola and Hugo Guinness). Even the smallest role is garnished with the charming peculiarities that are vintage Anderson, though if I had to pick standouts, those would be Del Toro, Seydoux, McDormand, Chalamet and Wright, all of whom appear to be having a fine old time. And it’s a pleasure to hear the voice of Anjelica Huston (so divinely dry in The Royal Tenenbaums ) as narrator.

Regular collaborators who make vital contributions include DP Robert Yeoman, his visuals mixing black and white with color and alive with all the trademark symmetries, skewed angles and careful compositions; and composer Alexandre Desplat, whose doodling piano themes help shape the jaunty tone.

While The French Dispatch might seem like an anthology of vignettes without a strong overarching theme, every moment is graced by Anderson’s love for the written word and the oddball characters who dedicate their professional lives to it. There’s a wistful sense of time passing and a lovely ode to the pleasures of travel embedded in the material, along with an appreciation for the history of American foreign correspondents who bring their perceptive outsider gaze to other cultures. The mission of the magazine is summed up thus near the end of the film: “Maybe with good luck we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Production companies: Searchlight Pictures, Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Distribution: Searchlight Pictures Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Liev Schreiber, Elisabeth Moss, Willem Dafoe, Lois Smith, Saoirse Ronan, Cécile de France, Guillaume Gallienne, Tony Revolori, Rupert Friend, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Hippolyte Girardot, Fisher Stevens, Griffin Dunne, Anjelica Bette Fellini, Winston Ait Hellal Director-screenwriter: Wes Anderson; story by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson Executive producers: Roman Coppola, Henning Molfenter, Christoph Fisser, Charlie Woebcken Director of photography: Robert Yeoman Production designer: Adam Stockhausen Costume designer: Milena Canonero Music: Alexandre Desplat Editor: Andrew Weisblum Animation supervisor: Gwenn Germain Casting: Douglas Aibel, Jina Jay, Antoinette Boulat

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‘The French Dispatch’ Review: Wes Anderson’s Dizzyingly Intricate Homage to 20th-Century Newsmen and Women

From Paris with love, the cult auteur dedicates this supercharged anthology film to the classic New Yorker reporters who’ve inspired him.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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Journalists are the heroes in “ The French Dispatch ,” so expect film critics to be a little bit biased in their embrace of Wes Anderson ’s latest. It flatters the field, after all, just not in the way that Pulitzer-centric mega-scoop sagas “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight” may have done before. Anderson is more of a miniaturist, albeit one whose vision grows more expansive — and more impressive — with each successive project.

Here, the Texas-to-Paris transplant sets out to honor The New Yorker and its ilk, re-creating the joy of losing oneself in a 12,000-word article (or three) on the big screen while relocating the entire affair to his adoptive home. Set in the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé — a cross between Paris and frozen-in-time Angoulême (where most of the exteriors were shot) — the film offers an expat’s-eye view of France, packaged as a series of clips from the eponymous publication.

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What does that mean exactly? Well, this is an anthology film, one that consists of “an obituary, a travel guide and three feature articles.” So while there’s no overarching narrative or overlap between segments, Anderson is quite clearly the author of all five — for there is no living filmmaker with a more recognizable visual signature, and every frame of “The French Dispatch” is unmistakably his. Thus, the unconventional project succeeds in delivering that very particular hodgepodge pleasure of reading a well-curated issue from cover to cover.

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Off the top, the obituary is that of erstwhile French Dispatch founder and publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray). He was a man of many maxims (among them “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose” and “No crying”) who could spot and champion talent in unlikely form, even if it meant bailing out of jail someone he believed to be a nascent writer, like Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a James Baldwin-esque dandy who recites every line of a wild-and-crazy kidnapping story by heart.

Today, journalists are expected to be moral, upstanding citizens with perfect grammar and even more impeccable ethics, but that couldn’t be less true of Howitzer’s crew. They consider “journalistic neutrality” to be a nonsense conceit, willfully injecting themselves into their own pieces. Frances McDormand plays the movie’s Mavis Gallant-like Lucinda Krementz, who reports on the student protests of May 1968 in the mostly black-and-white middle segment. She’s understandably intrigued by the young radical Zeffirelli B. (Timothée Chalamet), but rather than remain on the sidelines, she takes his virginity and improves his manifesto sur l’oreiller (or “on the pillow,” as the French so charmingly put it).

That’s as political as things get here, although relative to the rest of Anderson’s oeuvre — which typically falls somewhere between whimsical and twee — it’s a significant breakthrough to see the director engaging with sexuality and violence as aspects of real life. Yes, there’s still an ironic distance between such elements and the audience, but “The French Dispatch” feels less safe than Anderson’s earlier work, and that’s a good thing.

“I assure you it’s erotic,” culture hawk J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) insists in “The Concrete Masterpiece,” a profile presented as an upscale art lecture dedicated to modern-art bad boy Moses Rosenthaler (a bestial Benicio del Toro), a convicted killer who found his muse (prison guard Léa Seydoux) in lockdown. The way Rosenthaler gushes, it’s fair to imagine this rarefied intellectual may have been seduced by more than just her artistic genius — which is a very subversive way of parodying the late and ever-so-proper L’oeil historian Rosamond Bernier.

The movie’s packed with inside jokes for audiences hip to the arts and culture scene of 1950s and ’60s New York and Paris. Back then, a great many American creatives hopped the Atlantic, chasing the Lost Generation glory of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and found a city that embraced those ahead of the curve back home. Nationalism is now on the rise across Europe, but in Anderson’s France, the pen is still mightier than Le Pen. The director resists saying anything too controversial about French politics, then or now, laughing off value judgments (it’s a punchline that talk-of-the-town Rosenthaler is a literal enfant terrible ) and personal causes (Zeffirelli fights for free access to the women’s dormitory, rather than taking a stand against imperialism).

Anderson’s characters may be caricatures of serious writers, and yet, the movie’s tone is more consistent with The New Yorker’s comedic contributors: James Thurber’s cartoons, Woody Allen’s absurdity, Steve Martin’s satirical treatment of artists, critics and other cultural charlatans. Where “The Grand Budapest Hotel” served as an homage to a single writer, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s arms-wide-open tribute to a generation of complicated geniuses, so the winks come as dense and dizzying as guilty-pleasure movie references do in a Quentin Tarantino picture.

It can be fun to play detective when presented with such a collage, but “The French Dispatch” is a first-class pastiche, and as such, all those influences have been recombined into something new and original. That’s good news for those who aren’t longtime readers of The New Yorker, since this squirrelly collection of shorts is meant to stand on its own. In the past, the director has been accused of making overly contrived dollhouse movies, and while he repeats many of his favorite tricks — toying with aspect ratios, centering characters in symmetric compositions, revealing a large building in intricate cross-section — this time it feels as if there’s a full world teeming beyond the carefully controlled edges of the frame.

From the beginning, we’re told that The French Dispatch is a satellite publication “of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun” (it says as much in teeny-tiny type below the title), which serves as a reminder that this Francophilic love fest springs from a more or less Midwestern mindset. Anderson knows that when you’ve never been to Paris, even the prostitutes and pickpockets seem sophisticated, and that everything from a beret to a baguette can seem funny — to say nothing of a tongue-twister like “grognons” or a slightly stilted accent. When characters do speak French, the subtitles are so queerly styled and arranged, the movie seems to be daring you to read them.

Apart from Ernst Lubitsch or Jacques Tati, it’s hard to imagine another director who has put this level of effort into crafting a comedy, where every costume, prop and casting choice has been made with such a reverential sense of absurdity. If that sounds airless or exhausting, think again: Sure, it takes work to unpack, but the ensemble ensures that Anderson’s humorous creations feel human. At the top of the masthead — and indulgent godfather to his staff — Murray recalls not just editors Harold Ross and William Shawn of The New Yorker but also the great H.L. Mencken, who encouraged writers like John Fante, subsisting on pennies and orange peels, to find their voice.

Frivolous as this all may sound, Anderson is right to celebrate a generation who broadened our idea of what storytelling could be, shaping more than just journalism: They found poetry in the streets and heroes on the margins; they challenged the establishment and represented a nouvelle vague every bit as influential as the one sweeping cinema around the same time. Today, chasing web traffic and popular trends, the field has arguably evolved in the wrong direction, which more than justifies such a toast to those ink-stained wretches who once followed their instincts.

Reviewed at Blakely Theater, Fox Studios, Los Angeles, June 29, 2021. (In Cannes Film Festival — competing.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 107 MIN.

• Production: A Searchlight Pictures release, presented with Indian Paintbrush of an American Empirical Picture. Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson. Executive producers: Roman Coppola, Henning Molfenter, Christoph Fisser, Charlie Woebcken. Co-producer: Octavia Peissel.
• Crew: Director, writer: Wes Anderson. Story: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Hugo Guinness & Jason Schwartzman. Camera: Robert Yeoman. Editor: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Alexandre Desplat.
• With: Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Liev Schreiber, Elisabeth Moss, Willem Dafoe, Lois Smith, Saoirse Ronan, Cécile de France, Guillaume Gallienne, Jason Schwartzman, Tony Revolori, Rupert Friend, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Anjelica Huston. (English, French dialogue)

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The French Dispatch review: Utterly exquisite and deceptively complex

Wes anderson’s latest, a love letter to france and the new yorker, indulges in the romantic fantasy of a time when journalists were handsomely paid, creatively free, and beloved by their employers, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Wes Anderson. Starring: Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet. 15, 103 minutes.

Wes Anderson is a collector – of songs, old movies, and errant emotions. In his films, he carefully arranges these things like a young child displaying trophies on a bedroom shelf. That’s never been more evident than in his latest, The French Dispatch , in which he gets to expound on his twin loves: the country of France and the journalism of the New Yorker magazine. An anthology piece, the film offers up three short stories (and a little extra on the side) recounted by ex-pat American writers based in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé (which translates roughly to Boredom-on-Indifference).

And, like the very best of Anderson’s films, The French Dispatch is both utterly exquisite and deceptively complex – a film that, like the finest of dishes, is even richer in its aftertaste. At first, there is the aesthetic pleasure of his dollhouse dioramas. Never has Anderson’s work seemed so balanced, detailed, and precise, as captured by his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman. It’s also so packed with A-listers and favoured collaborators that appearances by Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan and Oscar winner Christoph Waltz feel almost like an afterthought. But then, underneath, lies the sadness – a distinct feature of the Anderson film, where very lonely souls try to romanticise their pain through Sixties records and vintage leather shoes. It should feel trite and inauthentic. But why, then, do his films always make me cry?

The French Dispatch specifically indulges in, and perhaps mourns, the romantic fantasy of a time when journalists were handsomely paid, creatively free, and beloved by their employers. Editor Arthur Howitzer Jr ( Bill Murray ), based on The New Yorker ’s co-founder Harold Ross, is unwaveringly sentimental about the craft, despite his gruff demeanour and “no crying” motto. Travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) guides us through Ennui-sur-Blasé’s gentrified history and rat-filled tunnels. JKL Berensen’s (Tilda Swinton) tale of an imprisoned painter (Benicio del Toro) and his muse (Léa Seydoux) takes subtle aim at the ways the label of “tortured genius” can descend like a fog in front of the eyes of others.

Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) falls in with a pack of student revolutionaries, led by the wild-haired and poetically inclined Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) – a treatise on “the touching narcissism of the young” who seek absolute freedom, whatever the cost. Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright, in the film’s standout performance), based on the writers James Baldwin and AJ Liebling, delivers an amusing tale of a fraught kidnap case that ends in an elaborate feast. What unites these disparate chapters is the shared conclusion that, in order to fully dedicate yourself to your craft, you must be ready to accept a solitary existence. Lucinda, at one point, ponders whether she’s crying because she’s sad or because the riot police’s tear gas has started to flood the room she’s sitting in. Both, in fact, are true.

But Anderson is no cynic, and The French Dispatch rigorously argues the worth of those sacrifices. Mostly, the vignettes play out in monochrome, but they blossom into his customary palette of pastels and faded neutrals whenever the story needs to express a writer or artist’s raison d’être – an abstract painting, a six-course meal, political radicals falling in love.

Anderson, who’s absorbed French culture like a bit of baguette sopping up the sauce from a plate, shows such care and delicacy in his vision of the country. Yes, it’s been filtered through his obsession with the New Wave movement and its filmmakers, like Jean‑Luc Godard and François Truffaut, but also through experience and memory (he lives in Paris).

The French Dispatch is never more moving than when it simply documents the daily rituals of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Terriers dashing across cobbled streets as an old woman opens a pair of shutters to let in the early morning light. A galette des rois, a traditional French cake, shared around a large family table to mark Epiphany. Teens crowded around a café jukebox, arguing simply because they can. What a beautiful place it is to visit.

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The French Dispatch Reviews

The film has an incredible cast and intricately, terrifically detailed production design that doesn’t feel real, but is practical and utilized in delightful ways. It’s a sensational fantasy.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2024

While perhaps The French Dispatch is not Anderson’s most free-flowing film, it is an amalgamation of everything Anderson has put to film to date, drawing on his love of cartoons, newspapers and French culture (in particular cinema).

Full Review | Aug 8, 2023

Like the very best of Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is large and contains multitudes.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

DELIGHTFUL in every sense of the way. I typically don’t like Anthology stories all too much but this one surprised me. Anderson developed three interesting & well polished stories that brought about a unique feeling that always comes from his movies

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

The French Dispatch is arguably Wes Anderson’s most ambitious film, definitely his most frenetic, and possibly the most alienating to all but the most devoted Wes Anderson fans.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Unfortunately, the cliche criticism "style over substance" fits this picture too well.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 25, 2023

At times overwhelming in scope, but never unwelcome, French Dispatch is what the audience expects from Anderson, but it doesn’t go far beyond that. It's a perfectly curated dollhouse in a candy-coated wonderland. There are worse ways to spend your time

It’s a tender, vastly underrated title in Anderson’s filmography, one that should grow even more in esteem as the years go on.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2023

After watching his tenth feature film, The French Dispatch, I am 100% confident Wes Anderson was raised in a household with parents that performed a traveling festival of living pictures on weekends.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2022

The French Dispatch is the film equivalent of a Wes Anderson amusement park, captivating audiences with color, chaos, and countless curious characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

If you’re one of those viewers who can only handle Wes Anderson in small doses, then his new film “The French Dispatch” probably isn’t for you.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2022

The French Dispatch is 2/3 of a great movie with a long slog in its middle

Full Review | Jul 21, 2022

Feels like slipping not only into Anderson's head but his heart, and more so than any other feature he's made.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2022

A great homage to the written word... the words transcend to the screen in the Wes Anderson Universe. Now, was [the film] spectacular? I'm sorry to say it was not. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 29, 2022

Far from the aesthetic pretensions that are taken to the paroxysm, its love letter to journalism seems to me as flat and wrinkled as a piece of newsprint thrown into the garbage can. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jun 12, 2022

A visual masterpiece bursting at the seams with talent both on and off the screen, "The French Dispatch" is a film by a director working at the absolute height of his powers.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 31, 2022

THE FRENCH DISPATCH is Wes Anderson at his best, most charming and masterful version. A wonderfully funny, romantic and melancholic feast for the senses and a great cast on top.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 25, 2022

An artistic & set design showcase that serves as a good diversion to amuse oneself when the story isnt particularly engaging. Overall it's an amusing movie with fun, quirky bits, but with little emotional resonance in the disjointed stories.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 28, 2022

Even with its faults, The French Dispatch is the most Wes Anderson film of all time. Suppose youre already a fan of his work like I am. In that case, this film will satisfy your wishes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2022

Unlikely to turn Anderson haters into advocates, but it is a humble and affectionate ode to writers that opened up his world.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 17, 2022

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The French Dispatch review: Wes Anderson at his most Wes Anderson-y

The French Dispatch is set, as some geography sleuths may have already deduced, in France, specifically a scenic little (fictional) village called Ennui-sur-Blasé. But where it takes place is not so much a spot on a map as a state of mind: the whimsical, arcane dreamworld of the Wes Anderson Cinematic Universe — a fantastical land of living dioramas and deadpan picaresques, stacked cameos and labyrinthine set design. A logical person might ask what the movie (in theaters Oct. 22) is actually about ; only a fool or a forensic film detective could attempt to answer that.

The players, at least, will be immediately familiar to anyone who has visited these Wes coasts before: Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe. Also Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Saoirse Ronan, Léa Seydoux, Liev Schrieber, Jeffrey Wright, and Elisabeth Moss. (Anjelica Huston, naturally, narrates). The year is nominally 1975, and Murray is the gruff owner-editor of the titular magazine, a periodical spun from "a largely unread Sunday supplement" of his native Liberty, Kansas.

The Dispatch 's subjects, divided into chapters like a live-action New Yorker newsletter, are as willfully far-flung as they are strange: In the first, a lecture on a madman painter (del Toro) and his prison-guard muse (a steely, extremely nude Seydoux) whose work is frantically pursued by an eager investor (Brody) and his two elderly uncles (Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban, whom it might be best to call silent partners). Swinton, her wig and gown glowing Heatmiser orange, is our tipsy, confiding tour guide. In the next, it's a much sterner McDormand — a veteran reporter caught up with a student rebellion leader played by Chalamet with electrified young-Einstein hair and a penchant for pretty young radicals and grand manifestos.

Then there's Jeffrey Wright's soulful, sad-eyed Roebuck, whose purported beat is food and beverages, but whose coverage extends to the kidnapping case of a little boy caught up in a rogue crew that includes Ronan as a strung-out showgirl and somehow, a permed Dafoe trapped in a chicken coop. Roebuck is recounting his tale on some kind of '70s talk show set to a suave Schreiber, who appears to be following the story's spiraling tangents only marginally better than his audience. Can you blame him? The dialogue is so dense and discursive that it often seems to be running at time-and-a-half speed, and there is, as it were, no narrative arc to be found, other than the vague framing device of a central death.

There's hardly a director working today whose output is as stylistically distinct and instantly recognizable as Anderson's; at this point, he's become both an adjective and a genre unto himself. Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display. The movie is undeniably clever and intoxicating to look at, and his actors seem to thrill at the chance to chase the chemtrails of his wildly esoteric storylines. But he also seems to have lost (or simply lost interest in) the human emotions and sensical plots that tethered earlier gems like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaum s — and even his most recent film, 2018's bittersweet stop-motion reverie Isle of Dogs — to something more like real recognizable life. Dispatch is a trip, quite literally: a journey of remarkable, impenetrable design, with no destination in sight. Grade: B

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The French Dispatch

A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Disp... Read all A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Dispatch Magazine". A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Dispatch Magazine".

• Wes Anderson
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• 672 User reviews
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• 25 wins & 122 nominations total

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• Trivia The animated segments of The French Dispatch were directed by Gwenn Germain, who previously worked on Anderson's Isle of Dogs. As a nod to Angoulême's comic heritage, the sequences were done entirely by local illustrators. The team comprised a maximum of 15 people, using The Adventures of Tintin and Blake and Mortimer as their main inspirations. The process took about seven months to complete.
• Goofs During the interview, Roebuck Wright's jacket chest pockets are unbuttoned and then buttoned after cut.

Roebuck Wright : Maybe with good luck we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

• Crazy credits Covers of different issues of The French Dispatch accompany the first few minutes of the ending credits.
• Connections Featured in What 16 Movies Looked Like Behind the Scenes in 2021 (2021)
• Soundtracks Bouree Sur Place & Forward (Waltz in C# Minor from Les Sylphides) Written by Frédéric Chopin Performed by Steven Mitchell Courtesy of Danceables Records

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• October 22, 2021 (United States)
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• Angoulême, Charente, France
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• $25,000,000 (estimated)
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• Runtime 1 hour 47 minutes
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The French Dispatch First Reviews: The Most Wes Anderson Movie Ever, and It's Fantastic

Critics say the eclectic director's singular style shines through in a sumptuous, visually splendid anthology film that warrants repeat viewings to appreciate all the details..

TAGGED AS: Cannes , Comedy , Film , films , movie , movies , Wes Anderson

The latest from Wes Anderson is unmistakably his, but it’s also something more. The writer/director’s tenth feature, The French Dispatch , premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, and the first reviews dispatched from the French Riviera are celebrating its mix of the familiar and the fresh. If you’re a fan of Anderson’s work, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re not partial to his quirks and constructs, you may still find something to appreciate in this anthology of stories that plays like a cinematic representation of an old issue of a literary magazine.

Here’s what critics are saying about The French Dispatch :

Will Wes Anderson fans be pleased?

This is the Wes we know and love, with his artful considerations of love, liberty and what lives on after we die. –  Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

It’s a film that weaponizes whimsy in ways that will dazzle die-hard fans of the director. –  Jason Gorber, Slashfilm

Was it worth the wait? Well, for fans of the American director’s idiosyncratic stylings, the answer is surely yes. –  James Mottram, South China Morning Post

[It’s] a beguiling curio, and one that no other filmmaker could have created. –  David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does it rank in his filmography?

It’s one of Anderson’s very best. – Ed Potton, Times

This is Anderson in full flower, one that only grows in a rarified altitude. – Todd McCarthy, Deadline

A work of such unparalleled Andersonian wit that at times the sheer level of detail that bedecked the screen was enough to make [my] jaw slacken. – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

Even by Anderson’s standards, this has to be the most ambitious film he’s ever produced. – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

Anderson’s most impressionistic and unusual film in quite some time… his most ambitious since his stop-motion adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox . – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

The Del Toro/Seydoux pairing stands out as Anderson’s most affecting love story since his 2007 short Hotel Chevalier . – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

(Photo by ©Searchlight Pictures)

Which of his films is it most reminiscent of?

The French Dispatch bears some of the DNA last glimpsed in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou , another portrait of a storyteller partly drawn from real life. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

The Grand Budapest Hotel [is] arguably  The French Dispatch ’s closest kin among Anderson’s previous films. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The French Dispatch initially feels like a companion piece to The Grand Budapest Hotel … but it quickly reveals itself to be something else entirely. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

One of the most labor-intensive films in existence. It makes The Grand Budapest Hotel look as if it was improvised over a weekend and shot with a smartphone. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

Does it feel like his most signature work?

The most Anderson of all Anderson films. It’s Anderson distilled, Anderson squared, Anderson to the nth degree. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

The ultimate Anderson movie because it’s everything he does whipped up into five jewel-box episodes… an Anderson sampler pack. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

The French Dispatch  takes Anderson’s signature play with nested narrations and his love of midcentury culture to new heights. – Pat Brown, Slant Magazine

Anderson has found a close-to-ideal structure that flatters his mercurial, omnivorous tastes but also gets him out of any one storyline before its convolutions can convolute too much. – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

The French Dispatch is a near-perfect encapsulation of Anderson’s filmography and perhaps the best film to show to newcomers. – Rafael Motamayor, Collider

It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Does it take Anderson in any new directions ?

Anderson employs too many new tricks in his tenth feature to keep track of them all…[it’s] original in a way that you can only marvel at so deep into a veteran’s filmography. – Luke Hicks, Film School Rejects

It’s a significant breakthrough to see the director engaging with sexuality and violence as aspects of real life…[it] feels less safe than Anderson’s earlier work, and that’s a good thing. – Peter Debruge, Variety

The French Dispatch  doesn’t have much of the sneaky sentimental undercurrent that makes Anderson’s films more than just intellectual exercises. – Tim Grierson, Screen International

[It’s] closer to a French New Wave experiment than the more controlled ensemble stories in his repertoire. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

I was expecting something more from this gifted director: more maturity, more depth, more interesting storytelling. – Jo-Anne Titmarsh, HeyUGuys

What if you aren’t a fan of Wes Anderson?

Anyone previously unimpressed by Mr. Anderson’s peculiar sensibility should run a mile in the opposite direction, and then a mile further. – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

You probably know whether you love his work or hate it. Well, The French Dispatch isn’t going to change your mind. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

Audiences who in the past have found Anderson’s work precious and overly mannered… [may] accuse the new film of veering almost into self-parody. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does the film look ?

Boy, it sure looks pretty. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

There is certainly much enjoyment to be found in Anderson’s amazing visuals. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Among his most visually remarkable, each frame filled with meticulously crafted small details that add up to a dense, inviting cinematic jewel box. – Tim Grierson, Screen International

Flicking between black-and-white and color, the level of detail in recreating 1960s-ish France is breathtaking, with production designer Adam Stockhausen excelling. – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

Adam Stockhausen’s doll’s-house production design is eye-wateringly precise, the black-and-white images of the city’s ancient buildings deserve their own coffee table book. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

The [black and white cinematography] stands up visually against the best Pawlikowski films thanks to the work of all-timer director of photography Robert Yeoman. – Luke Hicks, Film School Rejects

[It features some of] the most dizzyingly inventive shots Anderson has ever cooked up (which is saying something). – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Each frame [is] so drolly composed that its meticulousness itself becomes a joke. – Pat Brown, Slant Magazine

Is there more style than substance?

While it is full to the hilt with stuff – so much stuff! – it sorely lacks any real substance. – Jo-Anne Titmarsh, HeyUGuys

There isn’t much going on beneath its extraordinary bejeweled surface. The film is – to use a French term – a  jeu d’esprit  with no depth to its characters or edge to its satire. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

The marvelous design can prove more engaging than the characters who populate it… leaving the viewer to focus on the packaging as opposed to the content. – Tim Grierson, Screen International

Anderson overwhelms his film with so much detailed whimsy that dramatic conventions, narrative coherence and any deep meaning take a distant back seat to his entrancingly detailed doodling. – Todd McCarthy, Deadline

[It’s] series of exquisite miniatures — amusing, meticulously designed and impeccably executed but maybe not adding up to much more than the sum of their parts. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

The sentiment needed to really sell the wistful conclusion gets buried beneath all the cameos and stylistic flair. – Pat Brown, Slant Magazine

Who stands out in the cast ?

Jeffrey Wright gives a wonderfully poised performance. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Wright’s performance may be the strongest selling point of The French Dispatch , and the one that brings it all home. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Wright’s implacable authority is mesmerizing, Lea Seydoux as a prison guard/artist’s muse is a delightful enigma and Lois Smith almost steals the show as [a] wealthy art dealer. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

[Seydoux] brings a fierce, Fraco sullenness that’s particularly intoxicating, lending a kind of local credence with her role to Anderson’s entire folly. – Jason Gorber, Slashfilm

Del Toro and Seydoux’s scenes together are the closest this whirlwind movie comes to finding a human soul. – Nate Jones, New York Magazine/Vulture

What is it like to experience The French Dispatch ?

The unconventional project succeeds in delivering that very particular hodgepodge pleasure of reading a well-curated issue from cover to cover. – Peter Debruge, Variety

The experience is akin to flipping through the eccentric pages of the publication in question, overwhelmed by the details streaming in. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Watching this anthology-style film is like leafing through an edition of the magazine, as Anderson takes us from Page 1 right through to “Declines & Deaths.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

Watching Wes Anderson’s  The French Dispatch   is a delirious experience. It’s akin to being a guest at some amazing meal, with each course more stunning than the last. – Jason Gorber, Slashfilm

The cinematic equivalent of a brakeless freewheel through a teeming bazaar – if said bazaar was stacked with beautiful vintage artifacts, all meticulously arranged. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Do you need to be a literary buff to appreciate the film ?

The winks come as dense and dizzying as guilty-pleasure movie references do in a Quentin Tarantino picture. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Anderson has pointed to the New Yorker as his grand inspiration, and this shines through with plenty of references without ever feeling too insular or alienating to those with less affinity for the publication. – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

Unapologetically literary, Anderson’s credits thank a pantheon of long-form writers, from Mavis Gallant to James Baldwin, immediately providing a bibliography to delve into to elicit some of the more subtle real-world references. – Jason Gorber, Slashfilm

It will provoke the full range of reactions from the euphoric among pure art devotees to outright rejection by, shall we say, those not on speaking terms with ultra-refined tastes. – Todd McCarthy, Deadline

Will it make us laugh?

The French Dispatch is very funny. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Apart from Ernst Lubitsch or Jacques Tati, it’s hard to imagine another director who has put this level of effort into crafting a comedy. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Inspired physical comedy figures throughout the film. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The script is a relentless hoot. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

Does it have any major problems?

“The Concrete Masterpiece” is the best of all the stories. By coming first, it sets the following stories up for some emotional misconnection. – Luke Hicks, Film School Rejects

Its sense of busyness keeps it from achieving the emotional impact that its finale is clearly aiming for. – Pat Brown, Slant Magazine

The French Dispatch feels a bit emotionally distant compared to some of Anderson’s other movies. – Rafael Motamayor, Collider

Will we want to see it again?

It’s a film I cannot wait to visit over and over. – Jason Gorber, Slashfilm

Like any print classic, it begs to be leafed over again and again so that new details emerge. – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

Anderson seems to cram about 20 different movies into a two-hour runtime, and multiple viewings are definitely encouraged to even try and grasp half of what Anderson is trying to do. – Rafael Motamayor, Collider

It’s nearly impossible to follow everything on the first watch. Perhaps still so on the second and third… No doubt that will only make rewatches richer. – Luke Hicks, Film School Rejects

There is just too much to take in… It is a film that would warrant multiple viewings just to absorb those fleeting, marvelous images. – Jo-Anne Titmarsh, HeyUGuys

Some viewers will watch it 100 times and spot new little details every time. Other viewers will walk out or switch off in a matter of minutes. – Nicholas Barber, BBC

The French Dispatch  releases in theaters on October 22, 2021.

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The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson puts his byline on a dazzlingly conceived but over-loaded celebration of old-school journalism

Time Out says

Cast and crew.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• Screenwriter: Wes Anderson
• Timothée Chalamet
• Jason Schwartzman
• Frances McDormand
• Edward Norton
• Anjelica Huston
• Liev Schreiber
• Christoph Waltz
• Léa Seydoux
• Benicio Del Toro
• Adrien Brody
• Saoirse Ronan
• Fisher Stevens
• Owen Wilson
• Willem Dafoe
• Elisabeth Moss

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The French Dispatch is peak Wes Anderson. I wish I loved it.

Anderson’s latest film feasts on melancholy nostalgia for a world gone by — but the flavor is off.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The French Dispatch takes place in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, France — the name of which, to my chagrin, neatly matches my feelings about the movie. Wes Anderson’s latest (full title: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun ) is not bad, per se. It’s just that the eponymous listlessness and indifference is, for me, its entire emotional effect.

Part of the trouble with Wes Anderson is that I know he’s making movies specifically for me, an occasionally pretentious dreamer with francophile tendencies and a fetish for printed magazines. The French Dispatch is nostalgic, a little weird, visually sumptuous — all characteristics that are far too uncommon in mainstream American film today. In a plot- and spoiler-obsessed film culture, he’s the rare filmmaker who reminds people that movies are a primordially visual medium. He favors symmetry and fussiness, intricately designed tableaus and meticulously selected color palettes. (Occasionally I might argue he’s too visually oriented.) For some people, his movies play like some kind of soothing ASMR for the eyes.

The French Dispatch seems formulated in a lab for my narrative preferences. It’s not just that Ennui-sur-Blasé stands in for some imagined version of Paris, the kind that Francophile Americans imagine still exists in some corner of that storied town, a little seedy but also incredibly cute. It’s that the whole film is a tribute to the kind of literary magazine that so many writers of my vintage dream of working for, specifically the New Yorker , whose famed editors and writers, like Mavis Gallant, Harold Ross, and James Baldwin, furnish the models for a number of the film’s characters.

While there are some obvious differences between the French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun and the New Yorker — among other things, the latter has soldiered on into the new millennium — Anderson’s status as a New Yorker fanboy is clear from the start. He’s loved the publication since his teens, and owns almost every issue from the 1940s onward. In a recent interview with the magazine itself, Anderson said that in adulthood, “I found myself reading various writers’ accounts of life at The New Yorker —Brendan Gill, James Thurber, Ben Yagoda—and I got caught up in the whole aura of the thing.” He’s even worked to compile a book containing some of the articles from the magazine’s archive that inspired the film.

I’ve seen The French Dispatch twice, and I felt that aura, too. But both times, watching it was like smacking into one of those white limestone walls that line most Parisian streets. I struggled to care about its characters or stories or journalism more broadly. Somewhere in my soul, I feel this ought not to be.

If you’re a Wes Anderson fan and you’re mad at me now, I’m sorry! Kind of. Let me try to explain.

For Wes-heads, The French Dispatch is likely satisfying. It’s like a greatest hits album, with many of his favorite themes: loneliness, friendship, family, love, death. Every intricate tableau and winking nod to his influences feels like a nudge to the audience, an invitation to be in on the joke.

Which I mostly am. Yet I came away cold.

Anderson’s New Yorker stand-in was started by Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), scion of the owner of the Kansas Evening Sun, who more or less conned his way into putting out a “little-read Sunday supplement” to that paper for five decades. He posted up in Ennui-sur-Blasé as a youth in 1925 and ended his tenure when he died in 1975, whereupon the French Dispatch shut down — paying, of course, a handsome bonus to its already handsomely paid staff writers. (Nearly 50 years in the future, we who write for magazines on paper and otherwise can only dream of that kind of life.)

On his staff are celebrated journalists like Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), and Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright). They write about art and history, food and culture, protests and poetry. After revealing to its audience that Howitzer will have died by the end of the movie, The French Dispatch moves backward slightly to see Howitzer gruffly guiding them through the editing process (there’s a strictly enforced “No Crying” sign above his office door), inquiring about their expense reports and helping shape their prose. Based on an amalgam of New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross and his successor William Shawn, Howitzer is the kind of hands-on editor you don’t see much anymore. When he dies, the movie tells us, he receives “an editor’s burial.”

The French Dispatch is arranged as if it’s the final edition of Howitzer’s Sunday supplement, the one he was working on when he died. It’s an anthology film, with small segments that furnish the “articles” — one on the outsider artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his prison guard muse (Léa Seydoux); one on the leader of roiling student protests (Timothée Chalamet) and the girl he falls for (Lyna Khoudri); one on the author’s (Jeffrey Wright) encounter with a curious corner of French cuisine; and one by a roaming cyclist-reporter (Owen Wilson) on Ennui-sur-Blasé itself. There’s also an obituary for Howitzer, written by his staff.

Stylistically, The French Dispatch is Anderson working at the height of his powers. A delightful sequence near the beginning of the film features just a close-up of the hands of an expert preparing coffee and cocktails for the magazine’s staff on a rotating silver platter, then a wide shot of a waiter maneuvering the platter up an intricate set of staircases and doorways to reach the offices and deliver the drinks. He moves from black and white to color, playing delightedly with framings and image composition. Sometimes Anderson seems to be making a Jacques Tati movie; at others, he’s channeling Truffaut or Hitchcock or Visconti.

That may be the problem. The French Dispatch is so referential that the pastiche overwhelms, delivering a swirling vortex of references that don’t quite add up to anything in particular. Watching it reminded me of legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s response to Anderson when, in 1998, he showed his film, Rushmore, to his then-retired hero. “I don’t know what you’ve got here, Wes,” Kael said.

I don’t know what he’s got in The French Dispatch , either. There’s a strand of arguing for the essential joy of things that can’t be easily commodified, whether they’re old markets in French towns or a painting that can’t be easily transported or cuisine that can’t be easily located or little-read Sunday supplements to Midwestern newspapers. Anderson’s films are, themselves, part of this heritage of impracticality — his brand of fussiness is not easy or cheap to replicate.

But his world is a fantasy one, an imagined ideal that can be fun to sink into yet doesn’t leave a lot of room to walk around and think in. I felt like I was being distracted from something while watching the movie, my attention turned away from the bigger tragedy — the slow death of magazines — that’s hiding underneath.

Maybe it’s just the fact that the fantasy of the kind that The French Dispatch weaves feels a lot more like calamity if you work inside the world of magazines. Just this week, the announcement that The Believer, one of the few remaining staunchly impractical French Dispatch-like magazines out there, will cease publication next year , as part of a “strategic realignment” within the Black Mountain Institute, which publishes the magazine. The “little magazines” that shaped American thought during the last century have been slowly dying off, as have legendary alt-weeklies and local journalism. Most writers barely get paid enough to live on; workers at magazines and newspapers ( including the New Yorker ) are fighting for fair pay; those of us lucky enough to have jobs are always watching our backs, having seen friends lose theirs over and over again.

The New Yorker, for now, endures. (May it live long and prosper.) But watching market forces eat away at this kind of nourishing, curious, resolutely unlucrative but vital writing is soul-crushing. I can’t help but wonder if the frantic pastiche and rampant nostalgia of this film weakened my ability to enjoy it. It feels hollow.

One single moment in The French Dispatch did worm its way into my heart, however. Roebuck Wright, the amalgamation of James Baldwin and food writer A.J. Liebling played by Jeffrey Wright, is asked by an interviewer (Liev Schreiber) why he, an accomplished writer who’s covered many topics, has so often returned to writing about food.

Wright responds, slowly and thoughtfully, that the life of being a journalist is difficult and lonely. “I chose this life,” he acknowledges, before explaining that, at the end of the day, there’s always been a table somewhere for him, with a chef and a waiter ready to warm his heart and fortify him with a good meal. “The solitary feast has been very like a comrade,” he says.

Which I read, just a little, as Anderson’s statement about the feast that an issue of a great magazine has been to him. Or a great movie or, indeed, a literal feast. Something that sustains and delights the soul. So if I feel blasé about The French Dispatch — and despite my best efforts, I do — at least I admire and know what it’s getting at. Everybody’s feast is movable, and with movies and writing and art, there’s no accounting for taste.

The French Dispatch is playing in theaters.

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The French Dispatch Is the Most Wes Anderson Movie Wes Anderson Has Ever Made

Wes Anderson already had two features under his belt when The Royal Tenenbaums was released in 2001. There was his debut, Bottle Rocket, a lo-fi comedy about inept would-be criminals played by Luke and Owen Wilson that looks downright naturalistic compared with what would come after. Then there was Rushmore, about the friendship between a teenage oddball played by Jason Schwartzman and a wealthy depressive played by Bill Murray, the Anderson film that even the Anderson averse admit to tolerating. But it was Tenenbaums — a star-laden dramedy about a dysfunctional family of former child prodigies living in a fanciful Manhattan that stretches up to 375th Street — that would separate the fans from the haters. In this film, the intricate, airless visual style and tone of wistful melancholy for which Anderson has become famous would really cohere. If you had a taste for his whole thing, Tenenbaums marked the point at which you would know.

As someone who, with exceptions, usually does have a taste for Anderson’s work, I have come to accept that his movies cannot and should not be foisted on the resistant. This is more true than ever when it comes to the almost unbearably on-brand The French Dispatch , an anthology centered on a fictional magazine, a film that plays like a counterpart to The Royal Tenenbaums ’ dog-eared literary fantasia. While Tenenbaums takes place in a construct of New York as built up in the head of a Texas teenager as he pored over back issues of The New Yorker, The French Dispatch is flat-out New Yorker fanfiction. It doesn’t pretend for a second that Ennui-sur-Blasé, the cutesily named town in which it takes place, is real. The town is the receptacle for year-abroad fantasies, a setting where even the crime (like the menacing gangs of choirboys roaming the streets) is delightful. The artificiality of Anderson’s work has always been a feature, not a bug. He may have stopped making films about his home state of Texas after Rushmore, but he never really abandoned the perspective of a kid dreaming about distant locales. The French Dispatch takes place not in the France where Anderson himself has lived for years but in a France of the imagination.

The film, which is set in the ’60s and was shot in the real city of Angoulême, kicks off with the death of Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Murray, Anderson’s favorite elusive patriarch), the founder and editor of the eponymous fictional magazine. The wayward son of a newspaper owner , Arthur went to France as a young man and never came back. The French Dispatch first came to life as an insert in his father’s paper, the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun, an assumed loving act of nepotism. Arthur grew it into a successful publication, one he nevertheless dictated would end with his passing.

The film’s format mimics the collection of stories that make up the final issue. There are smaller bits of business — like Owen Wilson as travel correspondent Herbsaint Sazerac riding around on a bicycle while delivering a high-flown description of life in Ennui-sur-Blasé — in addition to three longer “features.” One of those, about a brilliant incarcerated artist named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), as described by art specialist J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), is droll and charming. Another, about the 1968 unrest led by student Zeffirelli ( Timothée Chalamet ) and reported by staffer Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), is borderline intolerable. The third piece, about a hostage situation that writer Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) stumbles into while reporting a food story, is sublime.

The French Dispatch flickers between vibrant color and nostalgic black-and-white, with the latter sometimes indicating a look back into the past. It’s as stuffed with visual detail as it is with Anderson’s regular collaborators, and big names like Edward Norton and Saoirse Ronan show up in what amount to cameos. But Wright — playing Roebuck as a man who owes something to both James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling — is new to Anderson’s universe, and his performance teases out the underlying heartache like no one else’s in the film. Roebuck’s segment is framed by his appearance on a talk show to chat with a host played by Liev Schreiber, who begs him to recount the story of how what was meant to be a trip to sample “police cuisine,” a haute cooking style shaped by the needs of cops and perfected by the great chef Lieutenant Nescaffier (Stephen Park), ended up giving him a front-row seat to what happened when the Commissaire’s (Mathieu Amalric) young son was kidnapped.

It’s a romp, full of touches that go by almost too quickly to pick up on — I was partial to the strongman who plays a small but key role — but the lingering mood is unmistakably sad. Each of the features stresses the solitary nature of writing and the ways in which the departed Arthur coddled and protected his stable of scribes, one of whom has never filed anything. The French Dispatch longs for a departed era of creative indulgence, for a time when journalists were able to turn in 10,000 words of noodling and expense the hotel rooms where they dallied with former lovers as research — extravagances that, as much as they ever existed, were offered only to a select few. But Roebuck also recollects how, after he was caught in a raid on a gay bar, Arthur, whom he had never met in person, retrieved him from jail and offered him a job. The moment speaks to something Anderson has always been good at: using the painstakingly assembled panoramas he creates as sanctuaries for his characters, who carry real suffering.

Putting your personal vision of other places and times onscreen can mean revealing your baggage, and Anderson hasn’t always shown an awareness of his own. He has seemed indifferent to the fact that a fantasy take on Japan can come across as vaguely fetishistic, while a fantasy take on France feels less fraught. (And even then, the film’s reduction of a political uprising to a symptom of youthful fervor comes as a minor affront.) But if his elaborately art-directed universes can be stifling, they can be comforting, too. After all, The French Dispatch imagines a portal between a sturdy midwestern town and the art, culture, and cuisine of Europe. One of the privileges of filmmaking is the power to re-create the world as you would like it to be. There has never been any doubt what Anderson’s looks like.

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‘The French Dispatch’ Review: Wes Anderson Doubles Down on His Style in Endearing Journalism Salute

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Cannes   Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 22.

It’s hard to imagine another living filmmaker with a style as instantly recognizable as Wes Anderson , a feat that works against him no matter how expansive his approach. “ The French Dispatch ” doubles down on it, with a freewheeling triptych of stories that make the case for his appeal by amplifying it.

So much has been made about the precise frames, the vibrant colors, and the deadpan delivery of Anderson’s work, but less about the substance beneath it. Anderson’s movies may be pretty, whimsical flights of fancy, but they also express genuine curiosity about the strange nature of human relations. The people at the center of “The French Dispatch” do that, too: This charming sketchbook of stories about American expatriates in France delivers a welcome salute to storytelling as a way to make sense of the world. A freewheeling three-part salute to old-school journalism in general and The New Yorker in particular, the movie works in fits and starts, swapping narrative cohesion for charming small doses of wit and wonder about odd people and places worth your time.

The result is an endearing and liberated explosion of Andersonian aesthetics that doesn’t always cohere into a satisfying package, but never slows down long enough to lose its engrossing appeal, and always retains its purpose. Closer to a French New Wave experiment than the more controlled ensemble stories in his repertoire, “The French Dispatch” is akin to Anderson inviting audiences into his laboratory as he mines for gold from real material, and fuses it with his homegrown artistry.

While its central publication is based in the fictional French city of Ennsui-sur-Blasé and serves an audience across the globe in Kansas, there’s no doubting the inspiration behind the scenes. “The French Dispatch” closes with a dedication to everyone from William Shawn to James Baldwin and Lillian Ross, all treasured writers from The New Yorker history books whose work inspired the eccentric tales within.

Molding elements of their work into his standard ironic cadences, Anderson explores topics as far-reaching as an imprisoned painter subjected to the absurdity of the art world, student revolutionaries in the sixties, and a convoluted kidnapping plot that involves both food porn and animation. The experience is akin to flipping through the eccentric pages of the publication in question, overwhelmed by the details streaming in.

As an inviting voiceover (Anjelica Huston) explains, “The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun” took its cues for 50 years from the guidance of one Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a muted Bill Murray, playing a lightly fictionalized version of New Yorker founder Harold Ross). Over the course of the intricate triptych that follows, Anderson assembles more embellished figures from the magazine’s pages, all of whom excel at the filmmaker’s brand of understated delivery, as they make even the most practical observations sound like punchlines. In lesser hands, it might get grating, and fast, but Anderson keeps the material fresh with a zippy screenplay and his playful Russian Doll approach to narrative, not to mention the ever-striking mise-en-scene and imagery that careens from bold palettes to black-and-white and back again. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman maintains the postcard-like precision of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” with such exactitude that anyone unfamiliar with the fictional setting might mistake it for a real place.

Mostly, though, “The French Dispatch” is a fun watch because it keeps reinventing itself. Each chapter gives another journalist the chance to take charge. There’s the straight-faced Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who writes about the exploits of quirky student activist Zeffirelli (a meme-worthy Timothée Chalamet), and ultimately sleeps with him before coaxing him to follow his true desires. The second, more garrulous entry follows arts reporter J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), who recounts the peculiar romance between incarcerated painter Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux), as well as the advances of a scheming art dealer (Adrien Brody). Finally, there’s Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) — an apparent blend of Baldwin and Francophilic foodie A.J. Liebling — who recites the bizarre story of a kidnapping taking place in the city to a talk show host (Liev Schreiber) while doubling back on a series of oddball tangents, with interjections from Murray’s editor for clarity.

That one’s a knockout, but “The French Dispatch” takes a lot of detours to get there. Somewhere along the way, Owen Wilson rides a bike around town for a slapstick interlude, animated sequences appear, and the cameos pile up all over the place, from Edward Norton as a police chief to Saoirse Ronan as a criminal and Christoph Waltz, apparently just hanging around. At times, the density of famous faces and circumstances gives the impression of a dizzying stunt: Anderson’s ability to corral a bunch of actors to do his bidding in a vibrant milieu has never been such an overt component of his filmmaking, and at times it threatens to undo the overall appeal.

Mostly, though, the scattershot assemblage of vignettes remain an absorbing and always quite fun ride, as Anderson makes his way from 1925 to 1975 with each story carving out a distinctive path. Among them, the Del Toro/Seydoux pairing stands out as Anderson’s most affecting love story since his 2007 short “Hotel Chevalier,” as it finds the characters enmeshed in the hilarious and touching story of a criminal man finding his purpose behind bars — and the deranged collector whose passive-aggressive advances build to a violent confrontation. Brody’s performance was inspired by Lord Duveen, the subject of a 1951 New Yorker profile by S.N. Behrman, and the character’s insistence that the prisoner must commodify his talent feels like Anderson’s way of addressing the pressures he faces as well: “All artists sell their work,” Brody insists. “That’s what makes them artists.”

But it’s the McDormand/Chalamet segment that allows Anderson to bring much grander ambitions to bear, as he maps out the story of student revolutionaries in smoke-filled bars with such overt early Godard overtones it’s a wonder he doesn’t include a reference to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. However, he does give us Chalamet’s Zeferelli in a bizarre love triangle with an older woman and the radical French motorcyclist (Lyna Khoudri) whose ideology doesn’t quite line up with his own. The sight of the pair mounted on her bike, speeding upward through a black abyss, is one of the most lyrical, even haunting, images in Anderson’s repertoire; it evokes the constant sense of mystery and journeying to exotic destinations, both real and imagined, that often exist at the center of his work.

Still, Wright’s performance may be the strongest selling point of “The French Dispatch,” and the one that brings it all home. His stern gaze and baritone delivery capture the essence of the soul-searching that has deepened and matured in Anderson’s films over the years. Decades after “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore,” the filmmaker’s scope has widened many times over. Continuing a trajectory he started with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Isle of Dogs,” he’s less invested in the particulars of family bonds or idiosyncratic journeymen than the way those sort of personalities feed into the larger equation of an enigmatic existence. When Bill Murray’s Arthur interrupts Roebuck’s story to clarify its intent, the moment feels like Anderson’s way of saluting the constant give-and-take necessary to make an impactful statement rather than just coloring in the lines of a pretty picture.

That’s the central tension that Anderson’s movies have always worked through. “The French Dispatch” bears some of the DNA last glimpsed in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” another portrait of a storyteller partly drawn from real life. There, however, the protagonist was literally lost at sea; here, the storytellers find stability to their mission in communal bonds. We learn early on that the publication’s editor died in 1975, and that the French Dispatch effectively died with him; the sweet climax finds the entire staff coming together for one last assignment. On a certain level, the fate of the paper suggests that this kind of handmade approach to distinctive human experiences died long ago, and Anderson’s salute to an earlier era may also be his version of an elegy. Certainly, the precise, discursive storytelling of “The French Dispatch” is in constant peril, but the very existence of this delightful movie is proof that it hasn’t gone away yet.

“The French Dispatch” premiered in Competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release the film in theaters on Friday, October 22.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the  safety precautions  provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

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The french dispatch review: a richly detailed tribute to the power of storytelling.

Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.

One of the most intriguing characteristics of Wes Anderson’s films is the paradox between the extreme orderliness of their compositions and the equally outsized flexibility in structure allowed by it. His narratives always exude the density of a thick, small-print block of text, and like a writer—in particular, like one of the modernists who he clearly admires—Anderson exhibits little compunction about moving back and forth between a story’s present, past, and future within the same paragraph, so to speak. With the help of voiceover narration and precisely framed (and often labeled) illustrations, the writer-director creates elastic pockets in a plot’s timeline, rushing off on tangents flooded with information about side characters before snapping back to the story in progress.

The French Dispatch takes Anderson’s signature play with nested narrations and his love of midcentury culture to new heights. This painstakingly detailed film embeds stories within newspaper articles, lectures, and TV interviews, and incorporates animation and text, in an ode to a mode of authorship that’s mostly disappeared with the decline of print media. Weaving several vignettes that illustrate stories from the titular newspaper based in the fictional and cheekily named French burgh of Ennui-sur-Blasé, The French Dispatch exhibits what may have been special about a borderline fantastical culture, but its sense of busyness keeps it from achieving the emotional impact that its finale is clearly aiming for.

The film is set sometime in the 1960s, as can be gleaned from the cars and the wallpaper, and buildings and spaces bear the influence of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot movies. In the prologue, a narrator (Anjelica Huston) eloquently introduces us to the various functionaries who pursue their respective crafts in the walls of the newspaper’s labyrinthine but cramped building, almost every one of them played by Anderson mainstays. At the center of the organization is its editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), who began the small, expat publication as an outlet of his father’s newspaper in Liberty, Kansas.

We don’t see too much of these characters, though, as most of the screen time is dedicated to stories by three of the paper’s star writers. Arts reporter J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), wearing giant dentures and a bright red wig, recounts the story of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), an abstract artist who’s locked up in the local prison for a double homicide. Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), an aging radical with a hidden vulnerable streak, writes of the local student uprising headed by a passionate youth named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet). And the erudite and sonorous-voiced Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) tells of a famous chef (Stephen Park) who gets wrapped up in a kidnapping plot and a police stand-off with the local criminal underground whose nameless leader is played by Edward Norton.

These relatively self-contained shorts each pay tribute to the casually serious midcentury intellectual, with their comfortable clothes, dangling cigarettes, and deceptively rigorous approach to the life of the mind. And their intense attention to language is, of course, reflected in Anderson’s own cinematic language. The filmmaker uses overt stylistic devices to delineate levels of narration—the lectures and interviews that frame the stories are in color, but the stories themselves are in black and white—only to profligately mix these styles up on an expressive whim. At one point in The French Dispatch , he switches back to color to show us Saoirse Ronan’s striking blue eyes as her showgirl character peers through a mail slot. At another, he abruptly transitions to animation for a rollicking action scene.

Anderson’s film is a tizzy, but a tightly controlled one, each frame so drolly composed that its meticulousness itself becomes a joke. On occasion, the action even grinds to a halt to serve Anderson’s need to see everything as a pictogram, as a riot in a prison-turned-art-gallery stops in place, improvised weapons looking ludicrous when frozen mid-swing. The French Dispatch is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition. But despite a wistful epilogue that makes Anderson’s genuine remorse about the passing of a certain kind of literary reporting evident, it’s not always easy to share his sense of feeling.

The French Dispatch ’s anthology format makes it difficult to draw emotional, rather than purely intellectual, connections between the individual staff of the newspaper. It doesn’t help that the film is so chockfull of recognizable talent with such tiny parts that Elisabeth Moss isn’t the only one who feels wasted, as well as a source of distraction. The sentiment needed to really sell the wistful conclusion gets buried beneath all the cameos and stylistic flair. It’s appropriate, then, that characters make frequent reference to a sign stenciled over the door in Howitzer’s private office that reminds his staffers not to cry. The good news for Howitzer—but much more ambivalent news for the rest of us—is that despite The French Dispatch ’s last-act turn to the sentimental, it’s likely that the audience won’t even be tempted to do so.

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Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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The french dispatch, common sense media reviewers.

Nostalgic tribute to expat writers has nudity, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Reminds viewers of importance of learning about th

Arthur Howitzer Jr. is a loyal, dedicated editor w

Most characters are White with exception of Mexica

An incarcerated person is a double murderer who ki

A couple of sex scenes: One shows two people lying

Strong language includes "f--k," "c--ksucker," "mo

Adults smoke cigarettes throughout. Adults also dr

Parents need to know that The French Dispatch is a comedy about the staff of a fictional 20th century American newspaper's magazine supplement, which is headquartered in the (also fictional) French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The movie features writer-director Wes Anderson's iconic art direction, dark humor, and…

Positive Messages

Reminds viewers of importance of learning about the world through written word, of the way writers and journalists tell interesting stories for their readers. It's a tribute to camaraderie of a newsroom/workplace where people respect and admire one another.

Positive Role Models

Arthur Howitzer Jr. is a loyal, dedicated editor who gives each of his writers individual attention and cares about the stories he's publishing. Each writer believes that they're writing about something important or interesting, whether it's local color, food, human-interest profiles, or youth protests.

Diverse Representations

Most characters are White with exception of Mexican Jewish prison artist Moses Rosenthaler; Black, gay writer Roebuck Wright, and Asian chef Nescaffier. Women writers are just as important to the publication as male writers.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

An incarcerated person is a double murderer who kills two bartenders. The violent act is heard; visuals are limited to blood splatter. Later it's revealed that the perpetrator decapitated and dismembered the men. Huge shoot-out between police and a kidnapping gang. A group of people is poisoned. A main character dies; his dead body is visible. Police forces throw a presumed criminal out of a plane; others are tortured, threatened. People kidnap a child and keep him tied in a closet. A bicyclist keeps falling down stairs and crashing into places. Rioters are met with tear gas and special forces in riot gear. A prison brawl breaks out; people are killed (violence is stylized).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A couple of sex scenes: One shows two people lying next to each other post-intercourse (bare shoulders, heavy breathing). Another couple is shown before having sex (she's topless, he's shirtless; they kiss). Two other people are shown in bed together, having had sex (off camera). Long scene featuring nonsexual full-frontal nudity of a woman posing as an artist's model. A young man in the tub is shown naked from the side (he covers his genitals).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "f--k," "c--ksucker," "motherf----r," and insulting terms like "demented," "deranged," "crazy," "insane," "savages," and more. One use of "good God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke cigarettes throughout. Adults also drink everything from wine and cocktails to hard liquor and even a mouthwash that includes alcohol.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The French Dispatch is a comedy about the staff of a fictional 20th century American newspaper's magazine supplement, which is headquartered in the (also fictional) French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The movie features writer-director Wes Anderson 's iconic art direction, dark humor, and melancholic themes. Unlike some of Anderson's younger-skewing movies, this film includes full-frontal nudity (nonsexual), a couple of stylized love scenes (partial nudity, but nothing more than kissing is shown), strong language ("f--k," "c--ksucker," "motherf----r," etc.), lots of smoking and drinking, and some scenes of violence (shoot-outs, a prison brawl, and more). A tribute to the camaraderie of the newsroom, it stars a huge ensemble of award-winning actors, some of whom are Anderson regulars ( Owen Wilson , Bill Murray , Adrien Brody , Anjelica Huston , Jason Schwartzman , Tilda Swinton , Saoirse Ronan , Willem Dafoe , etc.) and some who are working with him for the first time ( Timothée Chalamet , Elisabeth Moss , and more). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (4)
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Based on 4 parent reviews

I thought I was a fan.

Quirky, witty, star/studded visual feast, what's the story.

THE FRENCH DISPATCH is writer-director Wes Anderson 's nostalgic homage to 20th century newspaper and magazine writers and foreign correspondents. The movie's title refers to the name of a fictional American newspaper's magazine supplement: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The film follows the publication's editor, Arthur Howlitzer Jr. ( Bill Murray ), and his eclectic group of writers in the 1960s and '70s in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. It shows four different stories and the writers responsible for them. There's a local-color piece by photojournalist Herbsaint Sazerac ( Owen Wilson ); "The Concrete Masterpiece," an in-depth profile of imprisoned artist Moses Rosenthaler ( Benicio Del Toro ) by arts & culture writer J.K.L. Berensen ( Tilda Swinton ); and "Revisions to a Manifesto," a feature about a 1960s youth revolt in Paris by Lucinda Krementz ( Frances McDormand ), which stars Timothée Chalamet as one of the main protesting revolutionaries. In another vignette, James Baldwin-inspired writer Roebuck Wright ( Jeffrey Wright ) recalls, via a talk show, one of his most thrilling stories -- "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner" -- about a law enforcement officer ( Mathieu Amalric ) whose son was abducted while Roebuck was visiting him for a dinner prepared by a renowned chef.

Is It Any Good?

The auteur theory lives on in Anderson's well-performed, intricately staged homage to a time when editors and journalists were believed -- and beloved. While it's not necessary to read the New Yorker archives to enjoy The French Dispatch , it helps to be familiar with Baldwin, Lillian Ross, Mavis Gallant, Joseph Mitchell, Wallace Shawn, and other members of the United States' mid-20th century literati. All of the actors, whether longtime Anderson company members or new additions to his ensemble, seem to be having a grand time, but the standout heavy lifting is done by Wright, McDormand, Chalamet (whose role was reportedly written specifically for him), and Swinton. Léa Seydoux gives a mostly wordless (and nude) performance as Del Toro's prison guard/lover/muse. Wilson, Brody, Murray, and the gang are fun to watch, naturally, but Anderson's films aren't as much about the actors as they are about the director himself.

Here's where Anderson and his crew shine: the intricate set-building and art direction. Every detail in The French Dispatch , from the hilarious "The Kids Are Grumpy" graffiti to the prison-art gallery pieces to the mannered hair and costumes, looks as purposeful and precise as in a stop-action film. Part of that meticulous style, however, is that the emotional core of Anderson's films is secondary to the overall aesthetic. One needn't be a film student to pick out what Anderson's movies look like, but what they make audiences feel is a different story. There's laughter, there's melancholy, there's appreciation of everything from the clever character and place names to the absurdity of Tony Revolori and Del Toro playing the same character at different stages in his adult life. But ultimately, the movie remains emotionally at a distance, and for a story about journalists, that may be appropriate ("journalistic neutrality" is remarked upon at least four or five times), but it's also a bit disappointing. Go for the iconic Anderson touches, stay for a few notable moments and scenes, and recall the great foreign correspondents of the past, but don't expect some grand revelation.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about which of the various "stories" in The French Dispatch you feel is the most compelling. What resonated with you about it?

The French Dispatch has a lot of comedy, but it's also violent. Is stylized violence less intense than realistic violence? What about the sex? How is it portrayed? What values are imparted?

Do you think it helps to know about the real journalists that the movie is paying tribute to? What if you're not familiar with the historical references? Does the movie still work?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 22, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : December 28, 2021
• Cast : Timothée Chalamet , Elisabeth Moss , Owen Wilson
• Director : Wes Anderson
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Searchlight Pictures
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : History
• Run time : 103 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : graphic nudity, some sexual references, and language
• Last updated : June 12, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The French Dispatch Review

The French Dispatch

The French Dispatch is Wesley Wales Anderson (even his name sounds like one of his characters) with knobs on. A billet doux to literary magazines, a vanishing age of journalism, travel, France in general and French cinema in particular, it’s structured in a magazine format — an obituary, a travel section and three features — which gives it the feel of a portmanteau picture. This means it is slightly less fulfilling than some of Anderson ’s narrative features, but this is still a director working near the peak of his powers, and an intricately constructed movie full of dense detail, comedic invention — both highbrow and low — fantastic flights of imagination, exquisitely controlled filmmaking and an infectious sense of fun.

The magazine in question is ‘The French Dispatch’, a satellite publication “of ‘The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun’” (cue miniscule Anderson-style type below the title). The opening obituary is for Arthur Howitzer Jr ( Bill Murray ), an old-school editor with a “No Crying” sign above the door and useful journalistic advice (“Just try 
to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose”). We segue into a brief travel column as Herbsaint Sazerac ( Owen Wilson ) cycles round the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé offering insights into street corners and cats, split screens giving a poignant then-and-now perspective.

A rare Wes Anderson film that flirts with the real world, engaging with politics, sex and violence.

Then we are into the first feature proper. Relayed by Tilda Swinton ’s art correspondent J.K.L. Berensen, ‘The Concrete Masterpiece’ tells the engaging tale of convicted murderer Moses Rosenthaler ( Benicio Del Toro ), who uses prison guard Simone ( Léa Seydoux ) as a nude model and muse, catching the eye of dealer Julien Cadazio ( Adrien Brody ). The middle (least satisfying) episode, ‘Revisions To A Manifesto’, mixes Godardian radicalism and Truffaut-style romance as essay writer Lucinda Krementz ( Frances McDormand ) begins an affair with student Zeffirelli ( Timothée Chalamet ) during the tumult of May 1968. And saving the best ’til last, ‘The Private Dining Room Of The Police Commissioner’ sees Jeffrey Wright ’s food writer Roebuck Wright profiling genius chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park), who becomes embroiled in 
a kidnap plot involving a police commissioner’s ( Mathieu Almaric ) son, gangsters and an underworld accountant known as The Abacus ( Willem Dafoe ). It’s complicated but goofy fun.

Newcomers to the Anderson gang — Del Toro, Chalamet, Wright, Elisabeth Moss — tune into the wavelength as well as the regulars (hello, Jason Schwartzman ). All your favourite Anderson tropes are here: symmetrical compositions, subtitles, aspect-ratio shenanigans, huge cross-sections (a plane) and a pastel palette to rival The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg . But there are some tweaks to the formula, too. The French Dispatch is the first Anderson flick to feature an animated car-chase that could have leapt straight off the pages of Tintin . It’s also a rare WA film that flirts with the real world, engaging with politics, sex and violence, often absent from his twee, hermetically sealed universes. The end-note is weirdly wistful, the whole thing a joy to flick through. Subscribe now.

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‘The French Dispatch’ Is the Most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson Movie of All Time

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

They’ll tell you that Wes Anderson ’s new movie , The French Dispatch , is a love letter to The New Yorker magazine . The charge sticks. This is a man who fell in love with The New Yorker in the 11th grade; who once bought a bound set of forty years’ worth of the magazine from U.C. Berkeley for $600; and who even, for a while, paid to have his new issues bound for preservation. He is also a director known for geeking out over his appetites, obsessions, and taste in his movies — even if the man himself is too well groomed for the phrase “geeking out” to feel appropriately tailored to the man. Nevertheless, The French Dispatch feels inevitable.

But thankfully not in the obvious ways. Anderson has always displayed affection for great craft — and for the artist-geniuses responsible for that craft, including the collaborators who’ve made his cosmetically pristine, well-coiffed cinematic style possible over the years. This, as much as his well-documented stylistic habits (the tragicomic romanticism and nostalgia, the fantastical insistence on visual balance and emotionally coded-color schemes) is what has defined his movies. It is, for me, one of their better qualities. In Isle of Dogs , a scene of sushi being prepared renders the practice into an art form and the chef, hands nimbler than a heart surgeon’s, into an artist. The Grand Budapest Hotel gave us a prison break so clever that it’s almost more memorable for the crafty resourcefulness at play than for the suspense of the scene. The escape is too cheekily conceived for triumph not to feel like a foregone conclusion. Better to let it play like a Rube Goldberg machine: You watch to see how they did it. And you watch to see what contraption of a world the equally clever Anderson has invented to capture them doing it. 

The French Dispatch , the director’s tenth feature, differs for being an anthology film — four stories for the price of one. Yet it pays similar tribute to the ingenuity and style that have defined Anderson’s previous features .  It is a magazine in movie form, taking its title from the fictional French Dispatch , a Sunday supplement to the also-fictional Liberty Kansas Evening Sun . Anderson, who per usual wrote the script, unfolds the film article by article — starting with front-of-book local color by way of a bike tour through the magazine’s headquarters of Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, a place where altar boys wreak havoc on the elderly for laughs and an average of 8.25 bodies per year gets fished out of the local river. It is, like the settings of most of Anderson’s movies, a place that mixes the real with the just-short-of-real, too perfect not to feel manufactured on a soundstage, yet so rife with histories and personalities, stories and idiosyncratic details, it can’t feel entirely fake. A great place to be a magazine writer, in other words — as the French Dispatch ‘s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. ( Bill Murray ), fully knows. That’s why he convinced his father, owner of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun , to afford him this little outpost, this collective of quirky artist-journalists and the odd stories they’re prone to tell. More than just an anthology, The French Dispatch is a nesting-egg of a movie, one that treats the people therein — not only the writers and editors, but the subjects who’ve inspired their articles — with the same dedication and gleaming awe as Anderson gave that sushi chef and those prison escapees. Four writers, four stories, each overstuffed with a gallery of (in the usual Anderson style) eccentric, emotional personalities. Everyone becomes a part of the story. And genius, the film argues, can crop up in unlikely places: in an asylum for the criminally insane; in the kitchen of a police commissioner; in a youth movement being taken for granted by elders who can’t see the passion underlying the fractured, warring, romantic idealism. 

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This is all gathered, with effortless speed, within the framework of the French Dispatch ‘s last issue — the issue chronicled in Anderson’s movie. It is Howitzer’s unwitting parting gift to his writers and readers before, out of nowhere, he dies. The writers on staff, with their ESP-level typographic memory, their grammatical prowess, and their delightful verbal excesses, may or may not know how this will end: with Howitzer’s will dictating the closure of the magazine upon his death. So when he does croak, a fate made known to us early on, the magazine inescapably dies with him. This, the movie signals, is it. Like Grand Budapest before it, The French Dispatch is something more than a survey of those Andersonian qualities which, for the people who haven’t warmed to his films, are easy to characterize as twee, try-hard, quirky bullshit. It’s a testament to bygone creative ideals — including the right to enjoy quirky bullshit for its own sake. More than that, it’s a tribute to the people who make those ideals worth dreaming up to begin with.

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In The French Dispatch ’s best moments, Anderson serves up interpretations of, not just nods toward, the writers who’ve inspired him so. For a quick sense, look at the movie’s end credits, which begin with a dedication to a long list of New Yorker luminaries and their peers, from editor William Shawn, who helmed the magazine from 1952 to 1987; to founding editor Harold Ross (on whom Murray’s character is somewhat based); to a legion of classic New Yorker scribes, or fellow star-writers in their orbit, ranging from intrepid staffer Lillian Ross to non-staffer Lucy Sante, still one of our most vital chroniclers of not only New York life, but of the other Paris . 

These are, by and large, legends from a past era of that magazine, or more broadly, what might seem like a bygone era of roving, curious nonfiction. A smaller crew of writers stands in for that ideal; they’re the people “writing” the stories that The French Dispatch depicts. In one such story, Frances McDormand plays Lucinda Krementz, a riff on the Canadian flaneûse Mavis Gallant and her classic dispatches from the May ‘68 uprisings , which Anderson transforms into a wry, if nearly trivial, story about a student revolutionary ( Timothée Chalamet ) and a clash of generational ideals. In another, Jeffrey Wright plays Roebuck Wright, a Black American writer and expat in the style of James Baldwin who’s also a chronicler of food and all its mysterious pleasures, à la A. J. Liebling, that New Yorker legend who ate his way through Paris with verve .

Owen Wilson ’s bike-riding travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac, meanwhile, mixes a little bit of the razor-sharp Joseph Mitchell with a bit of Sante, and for good measure, adds a dash of famed photographer Bill Cunningham, a man taking stock of a city from the purview of a bike seat. And Tilda Swinton plays J.K.L. Berensen, an art lecturer and insider in the style of the theatrical Rosamund Bernier , spinning a fascinating chronicle of a Jewish-Mexican artist-prisoner named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), his prison-guard muse Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the c leverish, opportunistic-yet-sincere art dealer Julien Cadazio (Adrian Brody). Cadazio is another touchpoint, a character drawn not only from real life but also an actual New Yorker  story: S. N. Berman’s six(!)-part profile , from the Fifties, of the art dealer Lord Duveen.

A regular, one-volume Anderson movie would already be teeming with talent in front of and behind the camera. (On the latter front, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, composer Alexandre Desplat, and others of Anderson’s key collaborators have returned to produce worthy work here.) The cast is as abundant:  Elisabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman, Henry Winkler, Griffin Dunne, Lois Smith, Bob Balaban, Christoph Waltz, Mathieu Amalric, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Liev Schreiber, Grand Budapest ’s Tony Revolori — some of whom only have one-scene roles, or a handful of lines, or no lines. They’re all distinct apertures into the broader world that this movie has built. Take any of them out and you’d feel the difference. 

If it isn’t clear by now , The French Dispatch is not a neat, one-to-one assemblage of real people and their Andersonian fictionalizations, the kind of project that calls to mind the Coen Brothers’ Hollywood references in Hail Caesar! , in which the allusions stacked up so thoroughly that the movie risked seducing the audience into treating it like a treasure hunt. You could very well try to revel in The French Dispatch  in the same way. But the truth of Anderson’s movie arrives, like its best details, in miniature: in the smaller gestures, the looks that mark the end of key scenes, the uncanny webs of affection that define the stories — such as the moment that Revolori, playing a younger version of Del Toro’s murdering artist-saint, appears beside his older self, tugging the story from past to present tense through a gesture that feels near-ceremonious. Something unexpectedly affectionate plays out between these two actors, these two versions of the same man.

We often talk about what makes Anderson’s films feel so artificial, how their style risks suffocating any actual ideas, how it heightens the humor and the melodrama in ways that ultimately serve only to stifle them. The French Dispatch offers a counterpoint to this misunderstanding. It is a sterling example of what’s so movie-ish about his movies: the tactile visual fictions comprising cinema’s primary terrain. Anderson is still committed to using artifice to stoke, rather than stifle, pure emotion; he wants to mix and match pleasure with melancholy with humor with the occasional suicidal jag. And he still wants to remind us of the power of the camera, of the need to detail characters’ environments to an obsessive degree. It’s is a style born of collage: fantasy colliding with felt-reality. The movie’s exteriors were, in fact, shot on location in Angoulême, a town in the southwest of France. Even then, it’s France by way of Jacques Tati: whimsical by design, a cityscape just waiting for someone to notice that it’s a playground in wait.

Flipped through and sectioned off magazine-style, The French Dispatch feels unusually busy, with everything Anderson’s learned how to do over the course of his career culminating across the movie’s four episodes (five, counting the frame story). Every chapter is a feast. McDormand’s take on Mavis Gallant, for example, is rich for taking the real author’s cool detachment and manifesting it as something far less hands-off. Hers is a story concerning Parisian youths at a key moment in French political history, and while Anderson’s style gives it all a veneer of playful apoliticism, McDormand’s character does not have the privilege of that distance. She is forced to think seriously about “the pimple-cream-and-wet-dream contingent,” as she calls them, and what they’re asking of their elders. “I am convinced,” she concludes, “they are better than we ever were.” And yet she is one of the elders; their ideals, she writes, are “luminous abstractions.” She could very well be describing Anderson’s take on May ‘68, on revolutionary politics, on the place of the ironically detached observer amid real ideological tumult. Yet she and the movie nevertheless see the power and promise of those illusions, however vague its sense of the actual politics. And it turns out she’s something of a romantic herself — whether or not her prose would admit it.

Del Toro’s “literally tortured artist,” the protagonist of the Lord Duveen chapter, would admit it. This is a story about a murderous genius who signs up for an arts and crafts class, in prison, to keep his hands busy; he is suicidal. He falls in love with a prison guard, Simone (Seydoux), as former fellow-inmate Cadazio (Brody) falls in love with his scrappy, surrealistic paintings. Much happens. And, per Anderson, one of the most charged and enduring details arrives with so much panache you almost miss it. It’s a half-minute of twisty, ironic split-screen storytelling. To the right: a horde of art dealers and wannabe-geniuses packing themselves into what looks like an ore cart, burrowing toward the innards of a prison asylum to see a mad-genius-murderer’s 10-panel prison fresco. To the left: the hands of prison officials tallying up the bribes that make this strange excursion possible.

Money, money, money. This particular storyline is a chronicle that could otherwise, not inaccurately, be written off as yet another Anderson tale of a depressive male romantic and his picture-perfect fantasy-muse. Just don’t ignore this part: An art dealer tells a suicidal, homicidal artist that he isn’t an artist unless he sells his work, and the artist ultimately responds… with a fresco. A masterpiece painted onto the walls of a prison-asylum’s hobby room. Impossible to sell. Impossible to reproduce. Impossible to broadcast beyond the prison’s walls. Unless, of course, you have the money to buy those walls. 

It’s an odd but effective tale. Romantic, yes; sad, yes; even a little kinky. The Baldwin-inspired final chapter, about Roebuck Wright, somehow outdoes it. Anderson seems to know that Baldwin’s essay “Equal in Paris” (published in Notes from a Native Son ) is a touchstone example of an expat wrestling with conflicting feelings of love and alienation for homes both old and new. So this chapter — a firsthand account of the kidnapping of a police commissioner’s son that was supposed to be a story about the commissioner’s extraordinary personal chef — emerges as yet another kind of story: the lonely rumination of an outsider. Loneliness is a thread that links the French Dispatch writers’ lives, even that of big-toothed Tilda’s Swinton’s chic art expert.

Anderson, himself an expat living in Paris, may know a thing or two about the sentiments at stake in Baldwin’s essay, though of course his experience is not the same as Baldwin’s, for the obvious reasons. Still, he lands on something special in this chapter. Look at the brief digression in which Wright describes how he landed a job at the French Dispatch in the first place — a story that starts with him being arrested for being gay and landing in a cell called the Chicken Coop, which sets the stage for reliable Anderson gesture of emotional transference when, visiting that jail to write on it later, Wright sees another prisoner in the coop. He immediately understands something of the man; when a weekend passes without the man being fed, Wright notices. He puts it in his piece. 

This is what’s happening while, in the foreground, the two other threads — the kidnapping of a genius boy; the delight in a masterful chef’s cooking (this is the A.J. Liebling influence) — flutter about demanding our attention. It would seem that there is too much going on here. But Anderson weaves a careful, clarifying thread throughout, one that may not be fully apparent until the chapter’s very last moment. It is set back at the offices of the French Dispatch , when  Howitzer, editing the piece, rescues a line from the trash heap, an exchange of dialogue that Wright could have cut only out of fear of what it exposed of himself. Howitzer, recognizing this, advises: Put this back in the piece. It’s the best part. It really is. Seeing that cut segment of Wright’s essay after the fact, Anderson chips away at a sad, subtle point. And it somehow boils down to this: A writer, an editor, a superhuman feat of understanding.

Every section of The French Dispatch ends this way, right back in the offices of the magazine , with Howitzer, generous even when skeptical, wrapping things up by offering notes on each piece. He complains, he critiques, but not really. His talent is for seeing straight to the heart of the story; his trust in his writers, a given. It is a trust so stripped of sentimentality (“No Crying,” read the words above his office door) that it cannot help but be sentimental anyway, in Anderson’s hands, earnest in its depiction of what artists need in order to flourish. 

Nearly every story here offers the one-two of a vulnerable eccentric paired with a guardian, be it a loving parent or a prison guard-cum-modernist muse. Howitzer is one such guardian — for his writers. A rapid-fire editorial meeting at the film’s start confirms as much: Writers are Howitzer’s people. He forgives them their dangling modifiers and poetic excesses. He forgives breaking the rules — so long as the writer has honored a repeated, near-sacred pact, to make these deviations seem as if they’re exactly what the author intended. Every writer here breaks a cardinal rule of journalism: Don’t become the story . It’s a shame that, in the case of the two female writers ferrying us through this film, Anderson slips into the wearisome trope of women journalists sleeping with their subjects — even as, in the case of McDormand and her young revolutionary, the humorous improbability of the endeavor readily lends itself to one of the movie’s most compelling ideas. The writers of The French Dispatch can’t help but tell us stories about themselves. Their hapless willingness to abandon journalistic disaffection is what draws the line, the movie seems to say, between journalism and art, between straight reporting and the more candid, uneasy paths born of curiosity and sympathy run amok.

We could extrapolate from here to make claims about what Anderson must be trying to say about art, and the benefactors and guardians whose support makes free artistic expression possible. There is certainly much to be said on that front regarding the movie industry, even by a director who’s benefitted from precisely the safeguarded and encouraged freedom of style denied many other filmmakers. It’s no wonder he uses this movie in particular to throw in every Anderson trick, from a comic-strip sequence to tableaux vivants to shifting aspect ratios; his classic speed-ramped panning shots; his set-miniatures a la The Life Aquatic ; a literal play within the movie  — all of it. Ever since Anderson delved into stop-motion animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox , even the director’s live-action movies have begun to feel animated in spirit, the control-freak perfection of his images proving themselves to be too alive to what images can do to stick to the straight story.

It’s a liveliness that Howitzer would have encouraged.  The French Dispatch honors it movingly. Anderson’s specific love for The New Yorker is more than apparent. God bless. What proves equally if not more vivid is what, exactly, this love affords. The movie is an anthology not only of vibrant magazine stories come to life, but of seemingly everything Anderson knows how to do as a director. For some, this will inevitably feel more like a limit. For the rest of us, it’s one of his best. E ven when the film doesn’t entirely work, there is, simply, joy in watching Anderson work.

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The french dispatch review: overstuffed & dull, not wes anderson's best.

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Inspired by writer-director Wes Anderson’s love of The New Yorker , The French Dispatch indeed plays out like an ode to journalism, though one that isn't as impressive in story as it seems. Anderson has always had a distinct visual style and storytelling beats. In The French Dispatch , he takes those markers and magnifies them, though in this instance it's a detriment to the pacing and execution. The result is a lighthearted story, but one that is deeply frustrating, sluggish and unengaging, attuned to its stylish details above all else.

The French Dispatch follows expat journalists covering the fictitious French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé under the direction of their editor (Bill Murray), with each segment bringing the written stories from the publication to life in colorful fashion. The first segment, “The Concrete Masterpiece,” tells the story of a convicted felon (Benicio Del Toro), his jailer (Léa Seydoux), and the arts dealer (Adrien Brody) who profited off of him during his imprisonment. The second segment, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” sees a writer (Frances McDormand) covering a student revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet), with whom she has an affair. The third, and final, story, “The Private Dining Room of a Police Commissioner,” follows a journalist (Jeffrey Wright) as he retells an old story he once wrote that centered around a chef/police officer who investigates a kidnapping case.

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The French Dispatch unfolds like the magazine it's influenced by. However, while it may be inspired by journalism, it isn’t very interested in journalists beyond the stories they weave for the eponymous publication. The articles literally come to life, with the segments only briefly intercut with scenes detailing the process behind them. The ones putting in the work aren’t given their due, with Anderson’s screenplay swiftly moving from one section to another, the journalist’s personalities lost amid the grandeur of the stories they’re telling. The humanity that should imbue every scene is missing, with Anderson primarily focused on the theatricality of the events that unfold, and even then it’s not very interesting.

In many ways, The French Dispatch is a highly stylized, but idyllic stroll through the craft of producing stories for a publication. The film can be charming, yet cold and empty; energetic, but tedious. The characters are fast-talking, the humor absurd. The direction, cinematography, production design, and costumes are stunning, detailed, and pristine. And yet The French Dispatch lacks depth. Each frame is clean, every transition deliberate, but there is an air of pretentiousness, with the film’s stories having no heart or real intrigue. What's more, The French Dispatch focuses none of its time on the editor, how he runs the Dispatch beyond a few signs — one that reads "no crying" — or the relationships he's forged with his employees.

The film’s second story, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” sees McDormand’s Lucinda Krementz having an affair with Chalamet’s Zeffirelli. Anderson makes light of their relationship, which is meant to showcase Lucinda’s struggles with journalistic integrity, and the revolution itself (which is kept vague). It never feels like the events carry any weight though, proceeding emptily to the next moment, tied loosely together with narration that is far too overstuffed with exposition. Anderson’s brushes with racism or the prison industrial complex are glossed over to maintain the film’s droll intentions.

That said, the first story is the best of the three, more fascinating and whimsy in a way that somewhat works. It helps that the characters complement each other in memorable ways — Del Toro is gruff, blunt, but sad as the exploited prisoner, and Brody sharp and over-the-top. With Seydoux thrown into the mix as the jailer-turned-muse and the colored paintings standing out amid the black and white cinematography, "The Concrete Masterpiece'' is the most engaging and boisterous segment. Beyond that, and despite a star-studded and talented cast that includes Elisabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz (and even a cameo from The Grand Budapest Hotel's  Tony Revolori), The French Dispatch is a beautifully made, but dull and pedantic entry from Anderson.

Next:  Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch Teaser Shows Owen Wilson as a Cycling Reporter

The French Dispatch was released to theaters on October 22, 2021. The film is 108 minutes long and is rated R for graphic nudity, some sexual references and language.

The French Dispatch

The French Dispatch is an anthology comedy from director Wes Anderson. The story takes place in 1975 France when The French Dispatch magazine’s editor dies of a sudden heart attack. His last wish is for a final issue to be published, which includes four articles, “The Cycling Reporter,” “The Concrete Masterpiece,” “Revisions to a Manifesto,” and “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner.” Like most Wes Anderson movies, The French Dispatch has a substantial cast, including Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, and Léa Seydoux, to name a few.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Animal Kingdom’ on Hulu, a Bizarre French Fable About Human-Animal Hybrids

Where to stream:.

• The Animal Kingdom
• Magical Realism

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Magical realism meets pre-post-apocalyptic sagas in The Animal Kingdom ( now streaming on Hulu ), a strange French genre-bender about the Great Manimal Problem. Those are my words, not the movie’s – director and co-writer Thomas Cailley leaves the hows and whys vague and hones in on humanity’s (perhaps futile) attempt to continue business-as-usual in the face of an epidemic where human folks are mutating into bird persons, lizardies, manateemen and other assorted bizarre hybrid creatures. The film is an odd blend of tones and styles, and it comes off a bit like an arthouse X-Men . This is tricky, ambitious material, and I’m not sure it entirely “works,” but does that mean it’s not worth a watch? Let’s find out.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Francois (Romain Duris) and his teenage son Emile (Paul Kircher) sit in a traffic jam caused not by an accident or road construction, but a birdman. Seriously: This guy has talons instead of toes and wings where his arms used to be and head bandages that make him look like he just had beak-removal surgery. We get a pretty good look at the guy, and it’s hard to tell if he’s tortured by the predicament or amidst the painful process of being set free from the hell of humanity. Anyway, traffic finally moves so Francois and Emile can visit their wife-slash-mother Lana in a facility where non-escaped human-slash-beasts are being cared for, or studied, or medically treated, or, perhaps, imprisoned to the point where they may soon feel the need to rebel and break free? Again, hard to tell, but we get a good, long look into Lana’s simian-like eyes, surrounded by fur, and sense a pretty intense identity struggle going on somewhere in there. We also get a good look at Emile’s face, at the scar on his temple, as he stands next to a wall marred by deep claw marks, and get the gist: He’s been through some shit. 

But Emile and Francois seem to be doing mostly OK, it seems. They keep on keeping on, relocating to a temporary camping cabana in a rural locale after Lana is transported to a new facility for the creatures, or, if you’re participating in human society’s tendency to slap derisive labels on things they don’t like or understand, “critters.” Emile attends a new school, where a Draco Malfoyish creep considers the animal-folk freaks, and other kids wonder if humanity shouldn’t try to coexist with the creature. Emile makes friends with Nina (Billie Blain), who we learn is a vegetarian, suggesting she carries a profound respect for animals, which is a good thing, since her romantic interest is starting to act a little funny in gym class – you know, being able to single-handedly drag four kids to the ground in a tug-of-war. 

Like mother, like son, then? NO SPOILERS, man, but I will say Emile’s hair growth is more than a little excessive for the usual bounds of puberty, and he’s experiencing some troublesome issues with his teeth and fingernails, too. Is this funny? I can’t quite tell, but I think so, yes. Meanwhile, we’re privy to some father-son bonding sequences after a transport truck crashes and the manimals inside escape to the woods, Lana included. Francois is very weird about this, deciding that hanging clothing that smells like him and Emile, or driving through the forest at night screaming Lana’s name and blasting her favorite song, will lure her back. What his expectations are if should return, I don’t know, but it gets you thinking about troublesome things like the relationship between humans and their pets and/or, ulp, bestiality. Francois befriends a local cop, Julia (Adele Exarchopoulos), who’s either sympathetic to his cause or wants to smooch his face, I’m not sure which, but one thing I’m sure of is, Exarchopoulos deserves a better-written role. And things come to a head as military trucks roll in to do whatever it is they’ll do to the escaped creatures – surely the manimals won’t be greeted with hugs and snacks – and Emile tries to keep his transformation a secret. Here I spin the Fisher Price See ‘n’ Say to the fox, who says, CHAOS REIGNS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: MAGICAL REALISM also reigns around here, so think Beasts of the Southern Wild cross-bred with a Planet of the Apes that’s set between Rise of and Dawn of , with an inevitable nod to Birdman , some Shyamalanesque sleight-of-hand horror, weird American Werewolf in London -inspired comedy and bits of icky please-cut-away-from-the-oozing-wound-before-he-LICKS-it body blecch a la David Cronenberg.

Performance Worth Watching: Some of the supporting cast gets to do the full slither or squawkaroo as they lose their humanity, which is a little, you know, goofy . Kircher’s Teen Wolf isms are less so; he tugs on the reins a bit, finding the subtle comedy in the margins of human and beast as he undergoes his transformation.

Memorable Dialogue: Emile gets hung up on the details when maybe he should be freaking out about the bigger picture: “Worst of all is the fur. Wolf fur is bristly. It itches.” 

Sex and Skin: None, he said, breathing a sigh of disappointment, since the movie doesn’t make us really uncomfortable by going there .

Our Take: The Animal Kingdom nurtures a nether-tone, existing somewhere among horror, comedy, sci-fi and thriller, with a vagueness that’s sometimes tantalizing, sometimes frustrating. Cailley finds a bit of thematic traction in Francois and Emile’s father-son dynamic as they try to deal with a life where their mother/wife isn’t dead but is far from her old self, and that’s the film’s strongest component – they’re haphazard and reckless in their method of finding Lana, but they’re also hopeful, as if fully recognizing how surreal and ridiculous the situation is, and having fun in the face of significant personal and societal change. Part of the drama hinges on Francois finding out about Emile’s condition, and how he’ll react to it; part of it hinges on Emile’s self-discovery and wriggly psychology – what can and can’t he control about his behavior? – as well as his budding buddyship with the birdman, who calls himself Fix and is played with weird gusto by Tom Mercier.

One senses Cailley’s attempts to defy expectations in terms of tone, feel and plot, and some of the seams are visible – you’ll admire his vision and aspirations at the same time you’ll notice his calculations. And there are plenty of notable directorial flourishes here: Thoughtful cinematography, shrewd camera movements, an atmosphere of unease and a fantastical magical-realist visual M.O. that carefully balances practical effects with CGI. Where the film fails to adhere is in finding a central metaphor, which wavers among coming-of-age tropes and undercooked inferences about racial prejudice, human nature and the politics of extreme change. I never felt fully immersed in the strange not-quite-our-world reality Cailley creates, but I was nevertheless fascinated by what occurred within it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Magical realism can be either profound or deeply silly, and The Animal Kingdom , for better or worse, splits the difference. It doesn’t come together as a fully formed concept – it sort of feels like an extended pilot for a multi-arc TV series – but it stirs enough intrigue to warrant a recommendation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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‘Widow Clicquot’ Review: Champagne Mami

This muddled film, based on a true story, chronicles the origins of the French champagne house Veuve Clicquot.

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By Beatrice Loayza

In the age of fizzy corporate biopics , “Widow Clicquot” — which chronicles the origins of the French champagne house Veuve Clicquot — has a couple of things going for it. Set in the 1800s around the Napoleonic Wars, the film, based on a true story, is boosted by the historical sweep and feminist credentials.

Directed by Thomas Napper, it’s got all the trappings of a swoony epic à la the 2005 “Pride & Prejudice” (Joe Wright, that film’s director, is a producer on “Widow Clicquot”). But ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (Haley Bennett) is 26 when her husband, François (Tom Sturridge), the heir to a champagne business, dies. There are two timelines: One shows Barbe-Nicole, now considered one of the world’s first modern businesswomen, fending off her male skeptics as she takes command of the vineyard. Force majeure (wartime embargoes; spoiled shipments of bubbly) ruins her finances, but Barbe-Nicole perseveres, eventually creating an in-demand vintage and inventing a new process (the riddling table) that speeds up production.

The second thread looks back to Barbe-Nicole’s marriage with François and his gradual descent into madness, which was exacerbated by his addiction to opium. The cinematographer Caroline Champetier (“Annette”) captures the lovebirds in warm, luminous colors, providing a sharp contrast with the gloomy interiors of the wartime narrative.

Placing François at the emotional center of Barbe-Nicole’s mission, however, feels awkward and disingenuous, and the back-and-forth nature of the film kills the momentum. The brooding score, by Bryce Dessner, tells us that we’re in the realm of big drama, though I wish the film itself generated enough feelings to match.

Widow Clicquot Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.