VoiceOfEurope

Wes Anderson is an acquired taste. I liked some of his movies and disliked others. However, there's no denying that what he has achieved here is pure magic.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is romantic literature meeting the perfect rendering of those turbulent and historically disturbing (or disturbingly historical) years of Central Europe when style and piercing intellectuality had to give way to preposterous dogmatism and relentless destruction of thousand-year-old values. I never would have imagined an American director could tap with this precision on those slight nuances that gave this region I call my homeland its uniquely playful charm and later an air of decay that still smelled of royal patina.

The architecture, the set design, the costumes, the mannerisms are so peculiarly Central-European, even though the playful colors and general satirical layer give a whole new texture to the movie, I can't stop contemplating how much time Anderson must have spent researching our history going as far back in time as the golden years of the Austrian- Hungarian Monarchy and a pre-WWII Germany and Switzerland. He, for sure, has done a great job. The desktops standing on legs made of antlers, the crystal chandeliers hanging enormously like the sun on the sky, and the way the 'old' Grand Budapest Hotel transitions to the one in the late 1960s - torn and worn by socialism - are baring witness to his quest for presenting extraordinarily faithful details. Like I was turning the pages of my grandfather's postcard collection from East- Germany, Czechoslovakia and Southern Poland.

Elaborate and entertaining characters, playful visual effects paying homage to basic animation techniques used 40-50 years ago, joyful color choices, and it is all spiced up with some of the most memorable lines of the year. My guess would be, a good dozen of them will stand the test of time.

Ralph Fiennes is brilliant as always. A relentless powerhouse, yet he delivers this force with utmost wantonness. Goldblum as Deputy Kovacs is the icing on the cake. The rest of the cast is like the all-star game of the year too. You cannot expect anything else but greatness from this ensemble. And that's exactly what you get.

This is a satire however, not a suspenseful crime drama. So, go see it if you want to celebrate life and not mourn it.

'There still are faint glimmers of civilization left in this Barbaric slaughterhouse once known as humanity.'

I had high expectations when going to see this film. It had quite unanimously garnered words of exultation from critics and movie buffs. And not undeservedly so, as I was about to find out in 90 minutes.

The Inspector is pure and unpretentious. A true crime story - the end of which keeps you guessing until the closing sequences - with a delicate touch of humour and outright wittiness. A black comedy, true to the heritage of Shallow Grave and Very Bad Things, that is also reminiscent by its purity of the classics of film-noir. Certain qualities make you think about Claude Chabrol and Francois Ozon, others about David Lynch, while it is apparent that it was Six Feet Under that had the most influence on writer-director Attila Gigor. The Inspector is the quintessence of the best attributes of great pieces of the past, yet unique and utterly ingenious. In some scenes the protagonist's thoughts are shared with the viewers through sublime dialogues or monologues of other characters (some already dead by then), which make the film all the more bravely experimental.

Although I can only praise this piece of work with pleasant and justifiably complimenting words there was something I lacked in it. Something that would make it easier for me to rate it a tener. Something that is very difficult to articulate. Perhaps the best word for that would be catharsis. Yes, that was what I did not feel no matter how hard I tried. It just did not come. Don't get me wrong, this is a must see nonetheless. Way better than average. Actually, no crime story have managed to make me wonder what the outcome would be in quite a while.