In a recent write-up on the new Marvel flick Eternals, NPR reviewer Glen Weldon looks to find a silver lining in the release of yet another superhero monstrosity. Acknowledging that the whole genre has by this point become a kind of cultural white noise, he nevertheless proceeds to discover a sonorous whisper amid the din — in this case, the artistic imprint of indie director Chloe Zhao, whose influence is “all over Eternals.” Well, not quite. Because, as Weldon himself acknowledges, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) leaden, formulaic aesthetic still dominates the movie so much that flickers of the director’s own style are, at best, a negligible presence: “You’d be forgiven,” he writes, “for assuming that Zhao’s directorial presence would get buried, caught up in the gears of the MCU machine and ground into the same uniformly fine powder that gets baked into every Marvel movie. And it does get ground up, to a certain extent. But not entirely.”

The result, Weldon argues, is a film which “pushes back” against the standard complaints issued by those who “harbor a performative disdain for Marvel’s cinematic output” and, presumably, against those of us who find fault with the exhausting uniformity of the entire superhero genre. With no shade intended toward either Mr Weldon or Eternals’ Chloe Zhao, it’s a sorry statement about the current cultural landscape that the faint presence of an individual director’s style is now such a rare event that it’s one we’re invited to celebrate. The movies, it would seem, have grown so utterly homogenous that even the slightest deviation from the usual assembly-line format is supposed to be transgressive and avant-garde.

It’s in this context that we should situate The French Dispatch (full title: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun), the new anthology film from Wes Anderson — a director whose style is so distinctive that you invariably recognize it right away. This may be anecdotal, but I suspect my own arc with classic Anderson films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is probably one at least partly shared by many from my generation. I discovered his movies in my late teens and early twenties and was earnestly transfixed by their ornate beauty and whimsy. With a few years of cinema studies and a lot more films under my belt, I largely consigned them to the realm of undergraduate fancy, holding them to be amusing trifles more than beloved objects.