Oh Wes Anderson, Don’t Ever Change

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch — one of my most anticipated movies of 2020 — was released earlier today and it certainly does look like a Wes Anderson movie. And I mean that in the best possible way. The movie has the whimsical, highly stylized aesthetic that you’ve come to expect from the man’s movies, and it boasts an absolutely packed cast that includes Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, Jeffrey Wright, Saoirse Ronan, and Christoph Waltz (to name a few).

Here’s the premise, which even on paper sounds like something that could only have come from the mind of Wes Anderson: “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.”

I know that some will watch this and make a snarky comment about it just being more of the same. But I tend to agree with Walter Chaw: “Like, hate or indifferent, why would anyone want Wes Anderson to make something different? Are there not enough other filmmakers? Why would you want Pink Floyd to sound like Led Zeppelin? Van Gogh, pretty good but man, I wish he did something different sometimes?”

The French Dispatch arrives in theaters on July 24.