Not quite Anderson's best, but lovely all the same.

Rating: Null/10 (7 June 2012)

Moonrise Kingdom is a very Wes Anderson lovers-on-the-lam movie, as two emotionally disturbed 12-year-olds head for the hills, with a scout troop, a cop, social services (Tilda Swinton) and a couple of parents on their tail. After the baffling miscue that was Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson resumes his run of deadpan, dead-on films about damaged souls with this poignant portrait of loneliness and love. The first half is absolutely wonderful, full of lovely jokes and the director's usual off-kilter sentimentality, and if the second half can't match it - becoming too bitty, as well as curiously claustrophobic and small-scale at its supposed climax - it's still a very entertaining, amusing and affecting film. The familiar fonts, distinctive musical selections (Benjamin Britten and Hank Williams) and sad-faced protagonists are all present and correct, so if you like Anderson's (non-animated) films, you'll like it. If you don't, you won't. If you like some of them and not others, then you're weird and I don't understand you.