THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Basically…
The adventures of Gustave H, (Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of a legendary hotel during the wars. He teams up with Zero Moustafa, (Tony Revolori), the trusted lobby boy, as he fights to prove his innocence after being framed for murder.

In other words…
Faulty Towers…the silent movie…with too much sound…

The main men and leading ladies…
Fiennes takes top billing on the poster but he has a host of big names keeping him company. Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton are just some of the Hollywood A-listers on parade here. Special mention to Edward Norton as it’s becoming a rare treat to see him back on our cinema screens, and still not looking a day older either. An impressive debut for Revolori too, who will have learnt the a thing or twenty from the experienced heads around him.

In the chair…
With the likes of Fantastic Mr Fox, Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom in his back catalogue you’ll know by now that to get a Wes Anderson film you have to have crawled inside his head and understood what’s going on. You either love him or you hate him, and if you’re still sitting on the fence, The Grand Budapest Hotel will probably sway you one way or the other.

So…?
Find me a film this year that drowns in its own desperation to be witty and unique more than this one and I will be amazed. If Budapest was a cake, it would firstly be large, sweet and extremely pink, and secondly, it would have eaten itself before the second act had kicked in. Anderson is all about style over substance, yet remarkably he still manages to make it feel cold and detached. There’s no depth to any character, they come and go in a blink of an eye as he tries to squeeze as many stars into the cast list as he can, and there’s no time to form any sort of bond with anyone, let alone emphasise with them or their emotions. There’s a lot crammed into this film, very few of them worth singing and dancing about, but with the characters almost laughing at their own jokes there’s a strange gaping hole for some canned laughter. And don’t even get me started on the scratchy backing music that’s played over every second scene, its repetitive dying-violin drone will haunt you in your sleep.

Worth the money? 
Do I need to answer that?