There’s a section of Wes Anderson’s new film that I enjoyed more than any Anderson movie on the whole in many years. It’s an eccentric story-within-the-story called “The Concrete Masterpiece,” filmed in black-and-white, and narrated in a vivid color frame by J.K.L. Berenson (Tilda Swinton), supposedly an homage to famed art critic Rosamond Bernier. She’s speaking to a rapt audience lapping up her high-culture tales of the low-down arts. Her story is about psychopath Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), doing life in prison for two gory homicides, who suddenly finds himself the wunderkind painter of the modern art world. The credit for the segment’s effervescence mainly goes to Del Toro as the outsider artist, with an honorable mention to his costar Lea Seydoux (No Time to Die) as his jailer, lover, and model.

Del Toro pulls it all off somehow — the comically savage growls, the staring eyes in the ravaged, bearded face, the monologue (there’s always a monologue). In this one, when told he must make a mandatory statement for the prison’s arts and crafts course, he tells a long, increasingly bleak tale of his incarceration, despair, and probable suicide, ending with, “And that’s why I signed up for clay pottery and weaving.”

He does it impeccably.