"quirky"

2014 · Wes Anderson · 99 min · Comedy / Drama

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson with every tool in his kit working in perfect sync, delivering a film that looks like nothing else and somehow manages to be both his funniest and most emotionally resonant work. Ralph Fiennes turns in a performance so precisely calibrated between comedy and pathos that it redefines what you thought he was capable of. The visual craft alone earned four Academy Awards, but what sticks with you is the melancholy underneath all that color and symmetry. Some viewers will find Anderson's aesthetic too controlled, too precious, too much of a dollhouse to feel lived in. They're not entirely wrong, but they're missing the point. This is a film about how beautiful things disappear, and it proves that argument by being one.