The meticulous palette, the bursts of Academy ratio, the faux literary origins, the use of the word “divers” — Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch looks, from this first trailer, to be the most, well, Wes Anderson movie yet. As it’s described by its distributor, Fox Searchlight, “The French Dispatch brings to life a collection of stories from the final issue of an American magazine published in a fictional 20th-century French city. It stars Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson.” The […]

In Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson’s Japan-set return to the world of stop motion animation, there is a character with a face full of freckles. This seemingly incidental attribute required the film’s lead puppet painter Angela Kiely to place 297 freckles on each of the puppet’s many interchangeable faces. All told, she painted over 22,000 freckles for the film. That is the painstaking diligence required for the art of stop motion animation, a form demanding an obsessive attention to minutia perfectly suited to Anderson’s fastidiousness. In a Wes Anderson film, no detail – not even a single freckle – is […]

This is clearly promotional material, but it’s good: the cast of Isle of Dogs doing their regular EPK interview duties, but animated as stop-motion dogs. See Jeff Goldblum sing Duke Ellington as Duke the dog! See Bill Murray talk about the sacredness of dogs in a weirdly Manakamana-esque setup on a cable car! The press release notes this took three months to shoot, and it shows.

No stranger to branded content, Wes Anderson’s latest effort in this area is a four-minute short for H&M, whose logo bookends the film. It’s appropriately seasonally themed and features some very cool lighting effects.

Clara Podlesnigg gathers the many uses of windows in Wes Anderson’s films in this supercut.

The Rome Film Festival had a striking fresh look this year under the direction of its new artistic director Antonio Monda. The redesigned fest had a slew of hot films and top-tier tributes. But at the core of the new “festa,” or celebration of cinema, was a series of high-profile conversations with leaders in the arts. One of the main highlights of the fest was a conversation with Wes Anderson and novelist Donna Tartt in which they discussed their love of Italian films. While Tartt went in depth on her love of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Max Ophuls’ Everybody’s Woman, and Paolo Sorrentino’s […]

At first blush, the filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu and Wes Anderson would appear to have little in common, but this video essay from Anna Catley attempts to look past the more superficial aspects of their respective oeuvres to find striking and surprising similarities. From symmetrical frames to a faithful allegiance to familial strife and more in between, the filmic parallels are far more numerous than you may expect.

You’ve probably heard about the latest push to finally produce a finished, edited version of Orson Welles’ uncompleted final film, The Other Side of the Wind. In support of an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach have taped a video message urging you to just contribute already. Unusually for the famously controlling Anderson, he appears to have shot the video handheld selfie style.

From April 11-16th, more than 100,000 tech heads and industry professionals will descend upon Las Vegas to gorge themselves on the latest cameras, lights and gadgets at the annual NAB Show. Nestled among this digital idolatry, you’ll find at least one psalm to the archaic when cinematographer Robert Yeoman takes the stage to talk the miniatures, stop-motion animation and 35mm photography of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yeoman will be featured as part of NAB Show’s Creative Master Series on April 13th in a conversation with American Cinematographer managing editor Jon Witmer titled “Checking into The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Sponsored by […]

You can’t say that Rishi Kaneria doesn’t know what he’s interested in when he makes his supercuts. Following logically on the heels of “Stanley Kubrick: Red,” which looked at that director’s use of the color, now we have “Red & Yellow: A Wes Anderson Supercut.” Red’s on the left, yellow’s on the right, and there’s an oddly disproportionate emphasis on his 2007 short Hotel Chevalier.