THE FRENCH DISPATCH
Bill Murray, Timothée Chalamet, Benicio delToro, Tilda Swinton
It’s a great month for Chalamaniacs. Our Timmy is also in Wes Anderson’s latest, another of the year’s long-delayed and eagerly anticipated films. But if Dune is worth the wait, this frothy anthology comedy is a disappointment: slight and sketchy and only intermittently funny, it’s likely to frustrate all but the most devoted disciples of Anderson’s symmetrically built, pastel-painted church. It’s effectively three miniature capers, all loosely woven through the operations of an American newspaper’s French bureau in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blase. (Prepare for many more such throwaway jokes.) The best of them follows Benicio Del Toro’s mad convict artist outwitting a pretentious artworld clique; the weakest, Chalamet’s randy boy revolutionary in the May ’68 riots. But a week later, you’ll barely remember any of it beyond its pretty petit four aesthetic. 22 October