Review: 'The French Dispatch' Is a Film of 4 Quirky Stories

(AP) -- There’s a line that Bill Murray’s Harold Ross-like character Arthur Howitzer Jr, the editor of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, says a few times in Wes Anderson’s new movie that I can’t stop thinking about. “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose,” he gently advises his staff.

It’s clever, sure, and just familiar enough to make you wonder if it is some well-known writing advice. But what’s especially striking is that it's somehow both confident and self-deprecating —- a beautiful quip that’s full of insight and contradictions, not unlike Anderson films themselves. And it’s easy to wonder whether it’s a kind of window into Anderson’s mind, something he tells himself or was once told to make sense of his idiosyncratic aesthetic, which lately seems to have become a bit of a liability. For better or worse, Wes Anderson films always look, sound and feel like Wes Anderson films.