Amazeballs

Wes Anderson has never been interested in narrative momentum, not really—he’s always preferred the aromatic whiff of narrative, the barest hint of plot beaten into candy glass and served up in a diorama, with the flavorings drawn from a Boy’s Own Adventure half-remembered in French. With “The French Dispatch,” he takes this already rarefied style and, with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old let loose in the stationery aisle at Agnès B., multiplies it, refracts it, permutes it like a box of Ladurée macarons spilled across a New Yorker back-issue. It would be tempting, if you are not careful, to call this his ultimate film—the ur-Wes, the platonic ideal of his own butterfly-souled unreality—until, of course, you remember that this particular train has only gained steam over the years. If Anderson follows this path for another decade, we’ll need not a theater but a clockmaker’s bench and an electron microscope just to glimpse the latest nesting doll.

What does it mean to come of age on the wrong side of the tracks, in an era when a school blazer is both a uniform and a battle flag? Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings slips us into the fever hallways and bruised afternoons of 1990s Thailand, where vocational schools function as both families and war zones. And the miracle here—the surprise, really—is that the film doesn’t just wallow in nostalgia or gangster-movie clichés; it bristles with anguish, tenderness, and an ache for lost possibilities.

Frank Herbert’s “Dune”—the shimmering mirage that has sent both readers and filmmakers staggering deliriously across the cinematic wastelands—is the sort of Everest that seems to breed not triumph but splendid, gasping misadventure. The mythos is so overstuffed, so cryptic and unyielding, that every fresh assault on its slopes promises a new brand of madness: what you get, more often than not, is altitude sickness in Dolby Surround.