The French Dispatch

Yesterday I got to go to a real cinema, with a screen that must be 10x Guernsey’s meagre offering. I was racking my brain to remember the last time I even went to see something in the cinema, and the most recent I could come up with was seeing Promotheus on the school Oxbridge trip almost 10 years ago, so it’s certainly been a while.

I was lucky enough to go see Wes Anderson’s new movie, The French Dispatch at the BFI Southbank Centre as part of the London Film Festival. The whole experience was marvelous, with the venue being super relaxed despite being huge and almost full, and Wes having even recorded a short intro to the movie as part of its inclusion in the festival’s programme, which played beforehand. The film itself bore all his hallmarks, and while there were a couple of elements I was a little disappointed by (namely the amount of black and white shots used by a man so famed for his use of a vibrant palette of colours, and the lack of screen time given to some big names like Saoirse Ronan and Elizabeth Moss), I smiled my way through the whole thing. Funny, charming, and of course absolutely gorgeous, The French Dispatch was not only a great film, but a great all round experience.