Movie Review ‘The French Dispatch’: Wes Anderson Film has Pretty Surface, No Heart

Wes Anderson loves The New Yorker, and he loves France (where he lives), so he set out to make a movie about both. Now showing at the New York Film Festival ahead of an October 22 theatrical release, The French Dispatch is cute but kind of dull. I’d call it a French disappointment.

This high-concept, low-key exercise in sustained drollery is an anthology of three unrelated stories about small-town French life, framed as features in the eponymous magazine, which is published as a supplement to a Kansas newspaper. There is also a shorter amuse-bouche that is meant as a cinematic adaptation of a column about bicycling, and overarching all of this is the story of life at the magazine itself, at the helm of which is a gruff but writer-friendly editor played by Bill Murray. The magazine is published in an adorable, archetypal little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, whose name is the kind of almost-joke in which Anderson specializes.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Wes Anderson loves The New Yorker, and he loves France (where he lives), so he set out to make a movie about both. Now showing at the New York Film Festival ahead of an October 22 theatrical release, The French Dispatch is cute but kind of dull. I’d call it a French disappointment.

This high-concept, low-key exercise in sustained drollery is an anthology of three unrelated stories about small-town French life, framed as features in the eponymous magazine, which is published as a supplement to a Kansas newspaper. There is also a shorter amuse-bouche that is meant as a cinematic adaptation of a column about bicycling, and overarching all of this is the story of life at the magazine itself, at the helm of which is a gruff but writer-friendly editor played by Bill Murray. The magazine is published in an adorable, archetypal little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, whose name is the kind of almost-joke in which Anderson specializes.