Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) [295.5 points / 27 votes]
"As someone who has always had something of a love-hate relationship with the films of Wes Anderson -- always appreciating his style and thematic interests yet never quite connecting with them beyond, at best, detached admiration -- imagine my surprise when I came out of Moonrise Kingdom, his latest film, not only blown away but deeply moved in ways I’ve only been at isolated moments in previous Anderson works.
How to explain this? It’s not as if Anderson is doing anything appreciably different from what he normally does. With its bright storybook colors, toy-chest mise-en-scène and poised camera movements, the opening sequence of Moonrise Kingdom announces itself immediately as a vrai Anderson work, and not much in the rest of the film departs from that expected stylistic template. Maybe it’s the fact that his new film has two kids front and center. With the exception of perhaps Max Fisher in Rushmore back in 1998, Anderson has dealt with adults in a state of arrested development, and his visual style could be said to synch up with that mindset for better or worse. Moonrise Kingdom may be the first film since that previous one where Anderson’s fanciful style aligns perfectly not primarily with its adult characters but with its two lonely kid protagonists, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), both getting their first taste of adulthood in each other’s company.
That is not to say the film is all about the children, however. Adult disappointment hovers in the film’s margins, slyly suggesting what may lie ahead for these two young lovebirds in their later years. That Moonrise Kingdom ends on a note of hard-won affirmation hardly diminishes the melancholy at its heart. All of this has been in Anderson’s oeuvre before, but rarely in as focused, precise and affecting a manner as here. Either that, or I’m just now finally learning to stop worrying and love Wes Anderson after all." - Kenji Fujishima
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