Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.
By partially demonstrating what a fresher superhero movie might look like, it underlines its genre-defined limitations.
Each of Table 19‘s faint glimmers of grace are overwhelmed by elements of general spatial and narrative incompetence.
It’s a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of L.A.
This release of Anderson’s despairing and subtle comic masterpiece is almost certainly a placeholder for a more illuminative future Criterion edition.
As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his characters.
A film about history that avoids it entirely. Not out of cowardice or lack of nerve, but because the head-on acknowledgement of Europe’s long 20th century is quite simply too painful.
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