The French Dispatch (2021)
I didn't watch the trailer for this going in but once I figured out this was going to be an anthology piece about the titular fictional magazine I was fully invested. I minored in Journalism and have dabbled in feature writing and maybe in a different life I would have been a feature writer. But to say this is a writer's film or "a love letter to journalism" is to diminish that Anderson is still firing on all cylinders here. His camera techniques, set designs, aesthetics, and directions are all as good as they've ever been, it's probably just at this point you've decided if you love it, hate it, or are just tired of it.
Each chapter puts you in the perspective of the respective writer narrating their piece in the magazine, which all of them have also a role to play in as the story unfolds. The stories are offbeat, weird, often darkly hilarious and, quintessential Wes Anderson. The canter of character dialogue and the deadpan comedic performances as well as the return to troubled artists, young lovers, and whimsical family dynamics mean that none of this is particularly new, but the perspective and telling of it is different enough and I adore how this telling highlights the intertwined nature of the storyteller, the story they are telling, and the person delivering that story (in this case the magazine editor). As each layer gets peeled back, it adds to your understanding of the degrees of separation you have from each story and the way bits and pieces of it are shaped. This is probably best demonstrated in the final story where the writer and editor ultimately disagree on what the story is about and how it should end.
That whole meta-textual, self-reflexive layer takes me back to my old Kiarostami thesis days where issues of authorship and being too close to the subject you're filming all come into play. Albeit here the entire framework is a fictional one, but it still asks and provokes a lot of the same questions.
I can see myself returning to this one a lot. I can see why maybe others aren't as enthused about it, but it's the first time in about a decade I've seen a film that feels like it was made for me and I forgot how good that feeling can be.