The Grand Budapest Hotel is quintessential Wes Anderson—colorful whimsy so carefully designed it smothers the emotional resonance it so desperately wants to achieve.

Wes Anderson’s signature whimsy stifles the feelings that bubble under this young person’s journey. But his gift for storytelling, and a colorful ensemble cast, keeps Moonrise Kingdom from drowning.

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Room There are a lot of bad movies out there. Most fade into obscurity, as what makes them so awful is that they’re simply forgettable wastes of time. Yet every now and then a bad movie comes along that becomes a timeless classic based solely on its staggering ineptitude. These films set the standard by…

While the week between Christmas and New Year’s is far from a dead zone for movies, most of the new fare that’s going to be brought out before year’s end has already come out, and those that the studios did save for Christmas day release look wholly uninteresting, from sequels to films that were horrible missteps to begin with, to overly earnest inspirational fare. Instead, we’ll join the living in the past bandwagon and revisit…

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Indie: The Darjeeling Limited By now, five features into his career, it’s likely you already have a strong opinion on Wes Anderson. Despite his tendency to borrow liberally from his own film and literary heroes, from Kubrick to Fitzgerald to the entire French New Wave, a Wes Anderson film feels like a Wes Anderson film from…

Well, there’s Rick Foucheaux in a chair playing a dead guy again. And look — Sarah Marshall is acting crazy as only she can. And come to think of it, this is another Sarah Ruhl play that concerns itself with the afterlife. Is there anything original happening here? Yep. Pretty much everything, actually. Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the world-premiere Ruhl now onstage at Woolly Mammoth, tests your patience a bit in the early going,…

The man with the coolest name in contemporary rock music drew the largest crowd we’ve ever seen at the Rock and Roll Hotel last night. Keep in mind that it was a Wednesday. John Vanderslice also completely demolished the “fourth wall” between the audience and the stage, handing out Mrs. Field’s cookies, inviting a gaggle of fans to the stage for a sing-along of “me and my 424,” and descending from the stage to play…

There are many ways to celebrate the holidays and a favorite DCist tradition is going to the movies on Christmas day. While almost everything else will be shuttered tight for the holiday, area movie theaters are gearing up for this year’s big releases. Coming out Christmas day are the following: The Aviator: Howard Huges biopic staring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale and Gwen Stefani. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: A new Wes Anderson…