What’s it about?

A desert town in 1950s America is inundated by the attendees of a stargazer and space cadet convention.

What’d we think?

Asteroid City is a pretty solid addition to Wes Anderson’s canon, but lacks the bittersweetness that made his best films great. It’s a technically flawless bit of work, with wonderfully offbeat visuals and production design (y’know, like every Wes Anderson movie), and a massive A-list cast of Anderson’s regulars in roles big and small. The humour is absolutely spot-on, and it’s a real treat for the eyes, but whatever emotional landscape they were trying to explore in this movie is buried under so many layers of intertextuality that it wanders into Too Clever For Its Own Good territory.

Fans of Wes Anderson will probably put this somewhere between the middle of the top of his filmography, while those that dislike his style are going to absolutely loathe this movie. For what it’s worth, the audience I saw it with (myself included) had a great time, and I’d absolutely recommend it as a quirky little comedy that doesn’t quite nail the landing.