Let's talk about Dune, The French Dispatch, and Last Night In Soho
Our critics dive into three new movies from three major directors
The fall movie season is in full swing, and that means we’re getting a look at some of the most buzzed-about movies of the rest of 2021. On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife review three of October’s major auteur works: Denis Villeneuve’s enormous adaptation of the sci-fi novel Dune, which is now in theaters and on HBO Max; Wes Anderson’s foray into anthology storytelling, The French Dispatch, which is also on the big screen now; and the latest genre-blender from Edgar Wright, Last Night In Soho, which opens next Friday. Did these big names deliver with their big, highly anticipated, COVID-delayed fall movies? Let’s discuss.
Here’s what A.A. Dowd had to say about The French Dispatch in his written review:
It should come as no great surprise that Wes Anderson is a longtime, avid reader of The New Yorker. They share a sensibility, don’t they? Call it an appreciation of the finer things, coupled with a neat and pleasing organizational sense. Anderson, director of live-action movies with the visual imagination of cartoons and cartoons with the soul-deep neurosis of live action, has a style so singular it can be identified from a single frame plucked from the celluloid reels he still shoots on. Yet there is an antecedent for his beloved approach, and one big influence has to be the storied periodical he’s said to have consumed religiously in college, from whose pages he might have drawn a sense of humor at once refined and playful, an affinity for symmetries and pastels, and a voracious appetite for literary pleasures. Were Wes Anderson an airline, The New Yorker would be its in-flight magazine.
The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, henceforth referred to by the first three words of its title, is Anderson’s love letter to that 96-year-old highlight of mailboxes and waiting rooms—and by extension, to the nearly century of art, writing, and reporting contained within. The publication has been lightly fictionalized as the overseas satellite outpost of an American newspaper—a staff of correspondents based in the made-up French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Their fearless leader, guiding and “coddling” their peculiarities, is Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a benevolent crank plainly modeled on The New Yorker’s first editor.
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