5) The Grand Budapest Hotel
At this point you either love Wes Anderson or you don’t. While his filmmaking style has developed – The Grand Budapest Hotel representing the latest zenith in Anderson’s particular brand of choreographed eccentricity – the basic boundaries remain the same: the dialogue is snappy, the colours saturated and the whole movie filled with an oddly loving sense of contrivance.
While it may not win over many anti-Andersonites, The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s rampant box office success opened up his work to new audiences and ended up leading the line in a boom year for independent cinema at large. Spearheaded by a barnstorming Ralph Fiennes performance, Anderson’s homage to the works of Stefan Zweig ran like clockwork, its intricate and bonkers scenes punctuated by perfect touches of detail that owe a debt to everything from Buster Keaton to the classic Ealing comedies.
It’s frenetic, relentlessly paced, absolutely gorgeous and – above all – a whole lot of wacky fun.