Here's one I wanted to watch first-run but never got around to until tonight. It is astonishing.
It reminds me slightly of Closely Watched Trains. And if you act quickly, you can watch it for free on YT (but catch it before they scrub it!).
So yes, a Wes Anderson movie, and hooray for that. At the moment, there are very few American filmmakers with the ability to articulate such an original, idiosyncratic vision and the means to express that vision so freely. There is a lot of integrity here and also a good deal of ambition. This is a movie concerned with — and influenced by — an especially rich and complicated slice of 20th-century European culture, and therefore a reckoning, characteristically playful but also fundamentally serious, with some very ugly history.
Throughout, we are in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, a mountainous land that cartographers of various eras might have plotted on the distant marches of successive empires — Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet — or else erased altogether. The main story is rendered in narrow, boxy dimensions that evoke the films of its era, which is the 1930s. But there are two frames around this narrative, which is in effect a flashback within a flashback. We start out in 1985, under a late-Communist gray sky in a town of cemeteries and statues. An aging writer (Tom Wilkinson) shoos away his grandson and recalls the time in 1968 when his younger self (Jude Law) stayed at the nearly empty, Iron Curtain-tacky Grand Budapest Hotel and became acquainted with its elegant and enigmatic proprietor, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham).
http://www.nytimes.com/...
On the surface, there is a lot more comedy. The main plot spins around an elaborate, Tintin-esque caper involving a stolen painting and a clan of vengeful Zubrowkan nobles. (Ms. Swinton plays the matriarch, Adrien Brody her viperous son and Willem Dafoe the fearsome family hit man.) Zero, a refugee from another made-up geopolitical trouble spot, falls in love with Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), a baker’s assistant with a Mexico-shaped birthmark on her cheek. I will refrain from saying too much more about what happens, or about who shows up in what capacity.
If you haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself. It's a marvelous film, beautifully told.