The French Dispatch

The French Dispatch

The staff of an American magazine based in France puts out its last issue, with stories featuring an artist sentenced to life imprisonment, student riots, and a kidnapping resolved by a chef.

  • Released: 2021-10-21
  • Runtime: 108 minutes
  • Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
  • Stars: Bill Murray, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Timothée Chalamet, Léa Seydoux, Mathieu Amalric, Lyna Khoudri, Steve Park, Liev Schreiber, Elisabeth Moss, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Lois Smith, Saoirse Ronan, Christoph Waltz, Cécile de France, Guillaume Gallienne, Jason Schwartzman, Tony Revolori, Rupert Friend, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Hippolyte Girardot, Anjelica Huston, Denis Ménochet, Alex Lawther, Vincent Lacoste, Benjamin Lavernhe, Vincent Macaigne, Félix Moati, Wallace Wolodarsky, Fisher Stevens, Griffin Dunne, Stéphane Bak, Anjelica Bette Fellini, Lily Taïeb, Mohamed Belhadjine, Nicolas Avinée, Winsen Ait Hellal, Toheeb Jimoh, Larry Pine, Tom Hudson, Jarvis Cocker, Bruno Delbonnel, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Damien Bonnard, Morgane Polanski, Antonia Desplat, Sam Haygarth, Pablo Pauly
  • Director: Wes Anderson
 Comments
  • thePopcornExplorer - 27 January 2024
    Very charismatic form of cinema
    I will start by saying that this is my second Wes Anderson movie, and the first one I wasn't prepared for his type of cinema so I ended up not liking at all, but for this one I was going with the right mindset and open mind.

    I can appreciate the work involved and the original story telling, from the quick and smart dialogue, the production design associated with the camera work, the vivacious colors among other very famous Wes Anderson movie techniques, but it still didn't impress me.

    There are some interesting and important lessons to take from it, some quirky and funny moments all from what you expect from a Wes Anderson movie, but it still didn't grab me as an audience.

    I found it very strange as well to underuse some heavy weights in acting and recurrent collaborators of Wes himself, having a few seconds of screen time, this cameo appearances felt strange.

    It's a clear homage to journalism, specially written journal, and it transports you to older days with picturesque locations and characters but then again, there isn't much more than this, we see 4 (3 major and 1 small) anthology stories each with their own moral and set of actors, and we navigate through these storylines in Wes style.

    For viewers I would say if you are a Wes fan I would definitely give it a go, for the first timer I would say keep an open mind it's a different kind of movie style.
  • bkykbfkgs - 6 September 2023
    Anderson's Decent Into Self-Parody
    This whimsical nothingness, where everyone is an amusing but non-threatening thing - human lives abstracted into cartoonish entertaining little episodes - I suppose that is Wes Anderson's life and consciousness - something entirely, and successfully, summed up by a magazine format film, as a sequence of unconnected events where one thing just comes after the other thing after the other. Life as a slight pinprick to the brain, a brain that floats above reality, needing to order, colour-in and rearrange the mess and horribleness of life into something nice and colourful, orderly and whimsical, because it all too awful to cope with for a sensitive little thing - better just to wish it away and reinvent it as something that is safe, make it so life and feeling don't really exist, keep all that horribleness at a distance, because feelings are always so upsetting.
  • bignuts-06245 - 12 January 2023
    Not good at all!
    Once again I expected much better with an all star cast including Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bill Murray & many others but again I was left very disappointed! The film is about a few stories that made it into a paper known as "the French dispatch". One story is about a prisoner who becomes an artist & there were a couple of others which were so uninspiring that I've already forgotten what they were about! If I were you I wouldn't waste my time watching this, it's boring, strange & not worth wasting an hour & 40 minutes of your life on! I don't think Wes Anderson's films are for me to be honest, I've seen a few now thinking they would be good due to the calibre of actors in them but I've been let down every time so far unfortunately.
  • cpbirdie - 13 October 2022
    A Moving Picture Magazine
    Wes Anderson films are always intriguing, with subtle messages depicted in stylistic techniquest and highbrow aspirations. I usually have to view his films more than once to get the whole idea and appreciate the dialogue and narration that in this case can get away from you. Can anyone read the French translations fast enough without pausing? Even the clever end credit illustrations can't be appreciated along with the cast credits without a pause. I don't believe I'll watch this one again. It's a moving "New Yorker" magazine that intends to observe the absurd in the world, but it fails because it's too cerebral and not funny enough. Narration and cartoons to advance the story aren't always successful methods to make a cohesive, enjoyable motion picture. I'd rather read the articles and laugh at the cartoons in the New Yorker than watch this film.
  • iandlmayo - 26 August 2022
    Quirky yes
    I'm sorry but I was completely bored by this random collection of stories.

    I love the the artistic attention but completely bored by the disconnected randomness of it at.

    Had to walk out.

    It got up my goat had had to leave.