Director Wes Anderson is at his quirky best with The Grand Budapest Hotel, which features a very funny performance from Ralph Fiennes, says Tim Robey

Rating: 10/10 (6 November 2015)

Dir: Wes Anderson Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton
In his new comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson has found an elegant solution to gripes about how stifling, how annoyingly perfect, his films can be. He ignores them wholeheartedly. Obsessive design which forbids any sense of spontaneity? Check. Feelings put in inverted commas, or swept aside to concentrate on the colour palette? Check that too. Non-devotees might be bracing themselves, but the scales could just as easily fall from their eyes when they sit down to watch this. The trouble is: it's wonderful. It does all of the above, and it's still wonderful. You could get light-headed on the pure fun of it, which unleashes fresh waves of fun-within-fun at every point where you worry it might dry up. There are three prologues, each nested within the last as storytelling conceits to bring us back, in stages, to 1932, and Chapter 1. Here we're introduced to the story's prime mover – a famous concierge called Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes), who is the meticulous heart and soul of his establishment, a monumental pink palace perched high up somewhere in a misty Mitteleuropean mountain range. The will of one eminent guest, an 84-year-old widow called Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, becomes the contested centre of a farcical bust-up between Gustave and her money-grubbing family. Brief as it is, the role of this old lady is vastly enlivened by having a magnificently crusty and bizarre-looking Tilda Swinton play it. Madame D departs the Grand Budapest on the same day that a young lobby boy called Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) first comes to the concierge's attention. Gustave must school this pup in the ins and outs of the hotel, not least explaining his own peculiar role in the sex lives of its weathered residents. "When you're young, it's all fillet steak," he tells his new protégé, "but as you get older, you have to move on to the cheaper cuts."