Wes Anderson’s eighth feature has a heft beneath its icing, heart behind its artifice. Check in, and you won’t want to leave.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive, attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration.
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.
While it has many familiar ingredients — from the atmosphere to the ensemble of Anderson regulars in nearly every role — in its allegiance to Anderson's vision, everything about The Grand Budapest Hotel is a welcome dose of originality.
As off-kilter affecting as we found its nostalgia for a world of charm and dash that really only ever existed in the movies, and as terrific as almost all of the performances are, as a whole package it fell just slightly short of the promise of its parts.
A captivating 1930s-set caper whose innumerable surface pleasures might just seduce you into overlooking its sly intelligence and depth of feeling.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details.
It’s wonderful.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
Constant lateral tracks, push-ins, whip-pans, camera moves timed to dialogue, title cards, chapter headings, miniatures, use of stop-action, fetishization of clothing and props, absurdist predicaments — all the techniques Anderson has honed over the years — are used to pinpoint effect here.