Fantastic Mr. Fox is acclaimed director Wes Anderson's first animation, specifically stop-motion, and it's, well, fantastic. George Clooney's voice as the head fox of an animal clan that shouts diversity is straight out of Danny Ocean-- cool and witty with an overlay of sentimentality that would convince you to open your hen house door to let him have his way. That's after his little speech that tries existentialism on for size, foxwise that is: "Why a fox? Why not a horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? I'm saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who am I?"

As the animals pull a caper against farmer Bean (Michael Gambon) and his thugs, the animation pulls away from the gloom of another winner this year, Where the Wild Things Are, and confirms the fun of a well told beast fable with loads of anthropomorphism to reaffirm our love of humanity and confirm that animals, like us, will always be animals. The ease with which Anderson/Clooney convince that this stealing and mayhem are what animals do is a tribute to script and performance that seduce us into the stylistic den of thieves known as the fox lair and all its attitude and custom, sanctioned by mother nature herself. Mr. Fox: "The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?"

    Badger (Bill Murray): "No, you cussing with me?" Mr. Fox: "Don't cussing point at me!"

Such an exchange is indicative of the fun Anderson has with kids and adults by not bombarding the youngsters with profanity but winking at the adults as if to say, "You know what I mean." And the most violent moment comes not from scenes with guns but rather where the animals steal chickens and break their necks, done so gingerly and quietly that it seems what it is: Just what foxes do and what humans must do to eat the chickens. Darwin meets the cartoons: Mr. Fox: "And how can a fox ever be happy without, you'll forgive the expression, a chicken in its teeth?" That's Wes Anderson for you: Sartre and satire with a dash of dashing fox.

It’s great news that critics and viewers are responding, with enthusiasm and ticket purchases, respectively, to “Moonrise Kingdom.” It deserves both the acclaim and the popularity; for all its high style and exquisite artifice, it’s a tenderly romantic, warmly funny, and robustly physical story of young love and the lessons it holds for older lovers. It brings together many strands of cultural and personal memory, from the inside-the-tent view of boys being boys to the depiction of idiosyncratically smart and artistic kids feeling like outsiders at home to the red-coated narrator (Bob Balaban) who prophetically sets the story in the vast setting of geographical history. In short, it’s an emotional, sensual, and intellectual feast, one of the most extraordinary cinematic experiences since—well, since Wes Anderson’s last movie, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and the continuity from that movie (and all of Anderson’s prior ones) to the new one is the proximate cause of this post.

Anderson is one of the very few filmmakers whose images are instantly recognizable, whose name could even become adjectival, and there isn’t a shot in “Moonrise Kingdom” that seems anonymous or unidentifiable.
   

The documentary element that’s so alluringly present here (as in the views of the country to which the young lovers flee) is felt even more strongly in “The Darjeeling Limited” and looms even more unstably, on the high seas, in “The Life Aquatic.” But it may be the young actors of “Moonrise Kingdom”—above all, its stars, Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, newcomers to the screen—who, in their tremulous awkwardness, embody and convey most strongly the element of the uncontrollable and the spontaneous. And, undoubtedly, there’s an extraordinary tenderness in “Moonrise Kingdom”; its unabashed romantic passion story suffuses it with uninhibited, unambiguous warmth. The movie, as has been reported widely, is dedicated to Anderson’s girlfriend, Juman Malouf.

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.

"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.

"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).

    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. 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.

This delirious operetta-farce is an eerily detailed and very funny work from the savant virtuoso of American indie cinema, Wes Anderson. It is set in the fading grandeur of a preposterous luxury hotel in an equally preposterous pre-war central European country, the fictional Zubrowka.
   

The way that Anderson supersaturates every square inch of his film's intricate fabric, every sofa covering, every snow-capped peak, every word of every sans-serif lettered notice, with loving comedy is something that the author might not have understood or cared for. But Anderson's brilliantly crafted forms are something other and something better than pastiche. Ralph Fiennes is on glorious form as Monsieur Gustave, the legendary concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the early 1930s: a gigantic edifice in the mountains.

  Gustave is energetic and exacting, taking a passionate pride in the high standards of his establishment and ruling the staff with a rod of iron. Like them, he is kitted out in a Ruritanian purple livery which matches the hotel's decor.

      The infatuated Madame D infuriates her sinister son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) by leaving Gustave, in her will, a priceless Renaissance portrait belonging to her family. Gustave is thus to face the family's fanatical attempts to disinherit this counter jumper, involving her butler, Serge (Mathieu Amalric) and Zero's courageous fiancee, Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), who works in the local Viennese-style patisserie.

    As ever, Anderson's world is created like the most magnificent full-scale doll's house; his incredible locations, interiors and old-fashioned matte-painting backdrops sometimes give the film a look of a magic-lantern display or an illustrated plate from a book. It makes the audience feel like giants bending down to admire a superbly detailed little universe: I can't think of any film-maker who brings such overwhelming control to his films.