TheRetroCritic

Very few directors these days are quite as consistently creative and spot-on as Wes Anderson, who has been developing his unique visual and storytelling style with impressive ensemble casts and quirky-looking fables over the years with no hiccup. The Grand Budapest Hotel , his latest, was inspired by the stories and life of Stefan Zweig and tells the generation-defying tale of an iconic hotel and its nutty history. The film opens and we instantly flashback a couple of times from a little girl paying her respects to the statue of Tom Wilkinson's concierge, who ran the hotel in the 60's (back when he was... Jude Law), to that time where his younger self met the hotel's mysterious owner (played by F. Murray Abraham) and then we flashback even further to hear the latter's story in full. The focus becomes the young, newly hired lobby boy Zero (promising newcomer Tony Revolori) and his relationship with Ralph Fiennes' polite, professional gigolo poet concierge Gustav