ASTEROID CITY **

 You might describe Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" as the most Wes Anderson of Wes Anderson's films or even the most marmite movie ever made and I'm sure it's a film that will divide even his most ardent admirers. Personally speaking I'm still not sure where I stand on it; there is a lot here I liked and yet for about the first twenty minutes or so it seemed like a film I was destined to hate.

To say what it's about would clearly be a waste of time since it isn't really 'about' anything. I've often described Anderson's films as being like a series of New Yorker cartoons brought to life but they were New Yorker cartoons embedded in some pretty decent storytelling. Here he seems to have dispensed with storytelling altogether and just given us the cartoons voiced by his all-star cast. For a good deal of the time it works though sometimes the 'cleverness' just falls flat.

It's really another 'movie-within-a-movie' though as we are told by narrator Bryan Cranston at the beginning what we are seeing is a play in three acts, interrupted by inserts of 'behind the scenes' stuff. You could say the inserts represent real-life; everything else is the play with Anderson choosing black-and-white Academy ratio for the reality and widescreen and colour for the play which is set in the fictional Asteroid City of the title and where a group of junior star-gazers and others find themselves. The year is 1955, atomic tests are going on in the background and there's a spaceship and an alien on the prowl.

To be honest it's probably the slightest of all Anderson's constructs but it's certainly gorgeous to look at and given that they have nothing tangible to do or say the cast are actually very good and it's often very funny. It's certainly a marked improvement on "The French Dispatch" but I still long for the days of "The Royal Tennebaums", "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" or "Moonrise Kingdom" where the actors not only had roles they could flesh out but where Anderson found a humanity in the clever wordplay and where the background stayed in the background. The way he is going now he may as well ditch the actors altogether and just film his admittedly eye-candy sets.