movie review of asteroid city

Asteroid City

Max Fischer, the arrogant and beleaguered co-protagonist of director Wes Anderson ’s 1998 second feature, the classic and still-beloved “ Rushmore ,” had a lot of boasts in his repertoire, one being “I wrote a hit play.” Both an academic disaster and a relentless “can-do” guy, Fischer was performing an adolescence that would spare him having to confront its difficult parts, one of them being the emotional privation of losing his mother. 

I don’t need to tell you that Wes Anderson’s movies are highly stylized, nor do I need to tell you that many critics of his work have complained that his stylization works at the expense of emotional credibility and that “Rushmore,” which was released three decades ago, represents his most successful balancing act of visual design and genuine poignance. It’s a matter of taste. I’ve never been alienated by the lively neatness of Anderson’s frames. And as far as I’m concerned, “Asteroid City,” his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman , may be the most incandescently beautiful of all their movies so far. Additionally, its emotional impact is substantial. Imagine a gorgeous butterfly landing on your heart and then squeezing on that heart with sharp pincers you never knew it had. 

One of the key figures of “Asteroid City” is a fictional playwright named Conrad Earp ( Edward Norton ). He has written, we learn, a hit play, more than one, in fact. 

This film opens in lustrous black-and-white and square Academy ratio, taking the form of a TV documentary, circa 1955, in the United States of America. Before screening the film, my wife and I talked about what I might experience, and reflecting on the last few Anderson movies, we asked, “Voice-over or no voice-over?” to which the answer turned out to be “Yes, and no.” The faux documentary is narrated by a nattily suited  Bryan Cranston , who tells the story of the theatrical “Asteroid City,” a Carter Earp work, which is presented here by Anderson and company in gorgeous color and widescreen and cinematic brio.

If this sounds hard to follow—already!—well, it’s not. Anderson’s new movie is the most ingeniously conceived and seamlessly executed of his anthology/nesting multi-narratives. Earp’s play is set at a remote Western meteor crash site hosting a sort of Space Camp. The place is, as the settings for all of Anderson’s movies have tended to be, beautiful geographically/geologically (the orange of the desert and the cloudless blue sky create the visual equivalent of eating a Creamsicle on a sunny day) as well as in terms of building layout and design. None of the details, from the copy on the diner front to the displays of the vending machines, are extraneous. 

The Space Camp this small not-quite-town is hosting is a gathering of several scholastically gifted teens whose futuristic inventions—one of them literally a disintegration ray—are going to be stolen by the U.S. government (here presenting its most benign face via Jeffrey Wright ’s General Gibson). The brilliant kids all bring their own drama. Woodrow ( Jake Ryan ) is the oldest son of war photographer Augie Steenback ( Jason Schwartzman ), who, as a competition for a scholarship begins, hasn’t yet told the teen, or his three young daughters, that their mother is three weeks dead. Woodrow, nicknamed “Brainiac” by his beloved mom, finds an immediate and, of course, initially awkward affinity with fellow “Junior Stargazer” Dinah ( Grace Edwards ), the daughter of Midge Campbell ( Scarlett Johansson ), a movie star whose dedication to the craft is matched by her free-floating melancholy. Other Stargazers have different issues—Ricky Cho ( Ethan Josh Lee ), a healthy skepticism of authority; Clifford Kellogg ( Aristou Meehan ), a compulsion to challenge adults to dare him to pull ill-advised stunts. The ease with which Anderson packs characters and their odd traits into a never-flagging narrative (the movie keeps fizzing and buzzing throughout its 105-minute running time) is remarkable. 

The human drama of the Asteroid City portion of the film, which finds Augie, his father-in-law Stanley ( Tom Hanks ), and the Steenback children, among others, negotiating with awful grief, is interrupted by not one but two visitations by an alien spacecraft. The new knowledge of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe solves nobody’s problems—it just obliges them to stay in the desert for at least another week. Looking out their cabin windows at each other, Augie and Midge compare notes, with Midge concluding, “We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because … we don’t want to.” 

Johansson is utterly beguiling in a half-enigmatic, half-quietly-blunt mode, while Schwartzman’s performance is revelatory. The actor—who played Max Fischer and has participated in nearly all of Anderson’s films since—shows a new maturity here, gravitas practically, playing a helpless man rather than a stunted adolescent. The nature of his role—in addition to playing Augie, he plays the actor playing Augie, an actor-playwright Earp is initially reluctant to cast—allows him to forge two discrete romantic affiliations (one a maybe, one a definitely), which makes his performance doubly tricky to execute, and doubly pleasurable to watch. 

All of the film’s action—and there’s so much of it, and all of it revels in the joy of creation, of performance, of human invention that seeks a cosmic splendor—eventually concentrates on the banal and yet all-consuming question, “What is the meaning of life?” Of course, the movie’s characters don’t always put the inquiry so plainly. Here it takes the form of the statement, articulated like a plea: “I don’t understand the play.” Followed by the heartbreaking query, “Am I doing it right?” 

“Asteroid City” portrays a gorgeous gallery of people in various guises, performing art and performing life, all trying to do it right. It’s a sui generis contraption that nevertheless has its heart in the modern classics—I felt echoes of “Our Town” and “ Citizen Kane ” and such throughout. But most clearly, by the end, I heard the voice of a different master. Recommending the film to an old friend, I told him that “Asteroid City” was comparable to another great cinematic celebration/interrogation of performance as life, life as performance: Jean Renoir ’s “The Golden Coach.” Yeah, it’s that good.

Now playing in select theaters and available nationwide on June 23rd. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck / Jones Hall
• Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell / Mercedes Ford
• Tom Hanks as Stanley Zak
• Jake Ryan as Woodrow Steenbeck
• Jeffrey Wright as General Grif Gibson
• Tilda Swinton as Dr. Hickenlooper
• Bryan Cranston as The Host
• Willem Dafoe as Saltzburg Keitel
• Edward Norton as Conrad Earp
• Adrien Brody as Schubert Green
• Liev Schreiber as J.J. Kellogg
• Hope Davis as Sandy Borden
• Stephen Park as Roger Cho
• Rupert Friend as Montana
• Maya Hawke as June Douglas
• Steve Carell as The Motel Manager
• Matt Dillon as Hank
• Hong Chau as Polly Green
• Margot Robbie as The Actress
• Jeff Goldblum as The Extra-Terrestrial
• Tony Revolori as Aide-de-Camp
• Grace Edwards as Dinah Campbell
• Aristou Meehan as Clifford
• Sophia Lillis as Shelly
• Ethan Josh Lee as Ricky
• Fisher Stevens as Detective #1
• Preston Mota as Dwight
• Jack Eyman as Kim
• Bob Balaban as Larkings Executive
• Alexandre Desplat
• Barney Pilling

Cinematographer

• Robert D. Yeoman

Writer (story by)

• Roman Coppola
• Wes Anderson

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‘Asteroid City’ Review: Our Town and Country

In his latest film, Wes Anderson and his all-stars go meta with a TV show about a theatrical play that, in turn, is about a small town, U.S.A.

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‘Asteroid City’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director wes anderson narrates a sequence from his film, featuring jeffrey wright..

Hi. This is Wes Anderson. I’m the director of ‘Asteroid City.’ So this scene is near the beginning of our movie. We meet a general who has come to this town as one of the hosts of a gathering of young junior astronomers and scientists, kind of like a science fair in a meteor crater. And these are his opening remarks. The role was written for Jeffrey Wright, who I’ve worked with before and who I love. And what I thought is this character is going to come out and not just set the stage for this convention they’re doing, but more to set the stage for the decade. One of the sort of subtexts of our movie has something to do with how this placid period of the ‘50s is filled with anxiety and sort of these men with post-traumatic stress disorder that’s undiagnosed, that is being dealt with through their families. And by the time we get 10 years later, the effect that it will have had on the next generation will be so significant that there’ll be a complete shift. Anyway, that’s kind of a broad description of what’s in this little speech. “Chapter 1, I walk to school 18 miles each morning. Milked the goats, plucked the chickens, played hooky, caught fireflies, went skinny dipping in the watering holes, said my prayers every night, and got whipped with a maple switch twice a week. That was life.” We staged it in a way where it would happen in one shot, and it would be a performance like one that someone would give on a stage. And it was a dazzling thing to watch Jeffrey Wright take this scene and just expand it, and play it with a kind of momentum and also sort of a grandeur that was arresting to watch. Because on the day that we’re shooting it, I’m just the audience. “That was life. In the meantime, somebody else’s story. A man thinks up a number, divides it by a trillion, plus it into the square root of the circumference of the Earth, multiplied by the speed of a splitting atom, and voila. Progress. I’m not a scientist, you are. End of chapter 3.” The way we stage the scene, it’s sort of a complicated rig because we’ve got to start in one position, then we pull back. Then, Jeffrey comes to us, and then Jeffrey goes over here, and we go over there. And Jeffrey goes over here, and we go here. And Jeffrey goes over here, we move around side to side. And then, we push back in again. Well to do that, you’re either going to work with a techno crane or something that sort of telescopes and is a programmed remote head thing. Or you use what we use, which is a crazy set of sideways dolly tracks with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks. So you can slide forward and back and side to side, but it’s an extremely complex rig invented by our key grip Sanjay Sami. “To Dinah Campbell.” “It’s fueled by cosmic radiation instead of sunlight.” “For her work in the area of botanical acceleration.” “Unfortunately, it makes all vegetables toxic.” “The Red Giant Sash of Honor.” Then, we shift into him introducing us to the young people and what they’ve done, and they each get a prize. And so there’s a series of astronomical, celestially themed medals and badges and other kinds of things they get. But then, we see what each of these people has done. And I think they’re quite impressive, you know? I mean, from the perspective of real life, they’ve done some very good work, these teenagers, as we show in these scenes. [APPLAUSE]

By Manohla Dargis

“Asteroid City,” the latest from Wes Anderson, is filled with the assiduous visuals, mythic faces and charming curiosities that you expect from this singular filmmaker. It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy. It’s partly set in 1955 in a fictional Southwest town, a lonely four corners with a diner, gas station and motor inn. Palm trees and cactuses stipple the town, and reddish buttes rise in the distance. It looks like an ordinary pit stop save for the atomic cloud soon mushrooming in the sky.

Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. It opens in black-and-white on an unnamed television host (Bryan Cranston, severe and mustachioed) in a studio. Tightly encased by the boxy aspect ratio and speaking into the camera, he introduces the evening’s program, a “backstage” look at the creation of a new play, “Asteroid City,” that’s been made “expressly for this broadcast.” He then presents the playwright (Edward Norton), who rises from his typewriter to stand on a bare stage and present the characters.

The suited television host and the broadcast studio with its ticking clock conjure up 1950s live anthology dramas like “Studio One,” and you may flash on Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” when the host and playwright start speaking. Anderson quickly fills up the stage and the film, too. A train chugs in under the opening credits carrying a bounty of goods: gravel, avocados, pecans, John Deere tractors, plump Pontiacs and a 10-megaton nuclear warhead. Jeffrey Wright enters to play a five-star general, while Tilda Swinton shows up as a scientist. Tom Hanks plays a dashing curmudgeon; Adrien Brody makes the muscular theater director.

The drama starts soon after the playwright’s introductory remarks, except it doesn’t look anything like a theater production. It looks like a film, a meticulous, detailed, visually balanced wide-screen Wes Anderson one. There’s no proscenium, no stage, no wings, no audience. The blue sky stretches over the town; the yellow desert extends into infinity. The characters enter by car and bus, and are shot in long view and intimate close-up, beautifully framed by the camera. The palette is an astonishment, a dusty rainbow of hues. It looks like this story was left to bleach in the sun before being wrapped in transparent yellowed plastic.

The colors are mesmerizing and ever-so-gently destabilizing. These pigments signal that you’ve entered a new fictional realm that, like the television studio, is at once immediately recognizable and somehow foreign. The interplay between the familiar and the strange, like that between the theatrical and the cinematic, is a foundational theme in Anderson’s films, which, like most movies, look a lot like life yet are always different. What makes that difference is art — the voice, sensibility, technique, craft, money, luck and how the thrilling, terrifying mess of existence is gathered, organized and then set loose upon the world.

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Wes Anderson has outdone himself with 'Asteroid City'

Justin Chang

Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck and Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell in Asteroid City. Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features hide caption

Asteroid City is one of the most beautiful-looking movies Wes Anderson has ever made, and that's certainly saying something. Anderson is beloved — and sometimes derided — for his extraordinarily meticulous world building, and here he and his longtime production designer, Adam Stockhausen, have outdone themselves. Asteroid City is a 1950s Southwestern desert town, population 87, that's packed with gorgeous retro details: a diner, a motor-court motel, a one-pump filling station. There are also a few tourist attractions, including a giant crater left behind by a 3,000-year-old asteroid, and an observatory that hosts an annual Junior Stargazers convention.

Movie Review

The fast and the furry us: wes anderson's masterful 'isle of dogs'.

But the movie is also catnip for stargazers of a different kind. Like many of the director's films, it boasts an enormous ensemble that includes several of his regular collaborators, including Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum. There are also a few A-list newcomers like Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson, assuming you don't count her voice work in the animated Isle of Dogs . In Asteroid City , Johansson plays a movie star named Midge Campbell, who's like a cross between Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. She's come to town with her gifted teenage daughter, Dinah, who's receiving an award at the astronomy convention. Midge is eating breakfast at the diner when she hears Augie Steenbeck, a photographer played by Schwartzman, take a picture of her.

Jason Schwartzman, left, as Augie Steenbeck and Tom Hanks as Stanley Zak. Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features hide caption

Augie is actually the movie's protagonist, and Schwartzman brings a real soulfulness to his deadpan-melancholy line readings. Augie has recently lost his wife — a tragedy he hasn't found the courage to share with their four kids, including his own astronomy-loving teenage son, Woodrow. Tom Hanks gives a sweetly curmudgeonly turn as Augie's father-in-law, who doesn't like Augie much but has come to Asteroid City to support the family and spend time with his grandkids.

'Moonrise Kingdom': Quirk, And An Earnest Heart

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How wes anderson soundtracks his movies.

Child geniuses and cross-generational conflicts are a staple of Anderson movies like Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums and especially Rushmore , the film in which Schwartzman made his acting debut. As usual, there's also some inconvenient romance: Woodrow develops a crush on Dinah, just as Augie begins flirting with Midge, a tough-minded kindred spirit who's experienced her share of loss. Eventually, strange things start to happen. Mushroom clouds erupt in the distance, where atomic bomb tests are being conducted. Later, Asteroid City receives a surprise visitor — let's call it a close encounter of the whimsical kind — that will force everyone in town to confront their fears of the unknown.

But that's not even the strangest thing happening in this movie. Here's where I should mention the extremely intricate framing device that Anderson has devised. We're informed at the outset that Asteroid City is actually a 1950s play that's being produced for television, and that production is basically the movie we're watching. But periodically we'll see — in black-and-white footage — what's going on behind the scenes.

Bryan Cranston as "Host" in Asteroid City. Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features hide caption

Edward Norton turns up as the playwright, clearly modeled on Tennessee Williams. Adrien Brody plays an Elia Kazan-style director. And all the characters we've met in the fictional Asteroid City turn out just to be actors, trying to figure out how to play their parts at a moment when Old Hollywood theatricality is giving way to the more psychologically grounded Method style. It's a radical moment for the movie industry — as cataclysmic, in its own way, as a visit from an alien.

'The French Dispatch' is a love letter to 'The New Yorker' — and to love itself

Anderson's narrative formulations get more elaborate with every movie; his previous one, The French Dispatch, was an ode to The New Yorker structured like an actual issue of The New Yorker. The first time I saw Asteroid City , its play-within-a-TV-show-within-a-movie conceit felt too tortured by half. But I warmed to it more on second viewing. Anderson's surfaces can be maddeningly busy, but the ideas he buries within those surfaces tend to reward a closer look. And there's something undeniably poignant about the ultra-rigidity of his style. It's as if he were showing us how little control his characters have, how hard it is for Augie and Midge — and the actors playing them — to cope with the random setbacks and tragedies of life.

Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features hide caption

Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell

If Asteroid City leaves us with anything, it's the idea that scientists and artists may have more in common than they appear. The desire to create a work of art, or to unlock the mysteries of the universe, spring from the same creative impulse. By the end of the movie, none of these mysteries have been solved, but Augie and his family, at least, have reached a place of understanding. Amid so many significant scientific milestones, Anderson suggests, connecting with another person might still be the grandest human achievement of all.

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Asteroid City Reviews

With its over-saturated pastel desert landscapes and impeccably blocked compositions, Asteroid City foregrounds inauthenticity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 20, 2024

Anderson’s latest is near impossible to watch without a grin and is the outcome of utterly enchanting filmmaking from start to finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2024

The story-telling structure of “Asteroid City” is Anderson’s version of the Multiverse of Madness, minus the Marvel hyperactivity.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 7, 2024

Colourful and imaginative Wes Anderson whimsy.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2024

Asteroid City is a poetic, bright-colored mess, but it’s a mess that attracts people like me, and that’s sufficient.

Full Review | Apr 17, 2024

In a career that now spans nearly 30 years, Anderson's latest film – a carousel of astronomers, aliens and singing cowboys; of mid-century madness, deadpan soul and signature melancholy – might just be one of his finest.

Full Review | Apr 10, 2024

There is romance here. There is joy. There is a deep, terrified uncertainty.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 18, 2024

It sometimes feels as if Anderson is trying to tackle a little too much and wade a little too deep, but Asteroid City still manages to find its footing, if not its focus.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 3, 2024

How far the mediocre have fallen. Here is a movie you'll feel better about walking out on before it begins, than you will wasting the fifteen minutes it takes you to realize what a disastrous piece of inert garbage it truly is. Still, walk out you will.

Full Review | Original Score: ZERO STARS | Jan 13, 2024

Wes Anderson's Asteroid City is science-fiction of an entirely different stripe and the first movie of his I've wholly connected with since The Darjeeling Limited.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2024

I assume someday I'll grow tired of the Anderson Aesthetic but someday is not today.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Dec 27, 2023

A dance of emotions and a visual spectacle that ends up shaping the definitive film of its director, in which style and mise-en-scene are at the service of his story more than ever. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 26, 2023

...an almost prototypically oddball endeavor that remains hopelessly uninvolving for the duration of its running time...

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 24, 2023

This movie was bliss. It was great to see Jeffrey Wright, the standout player from The French Dispatch, solidify his standing among the Wes Anderson Players...

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

In ASTEROID CITY, Anderson creates a feel of the 1950s that is more convincing than accurate. This isn't up to his best films, but Anderson fans won't want to miss it.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 8, 2023

For someone as memed as Wes Anderson, you’d think he’d stop surprising us.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2023

An exercise of self-indulgence and soulless nonsense. To say this film is style over substance is a giant understatement, as everything plays second fiddle to the director's trademark visuals.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 16, 2023

[W]hile it might seem the plot is just a shallow, zany, brightly coloured excuse to set Alex Colville paintings in a desert, Asteroid City (both Anderson's actual movie, and the play within it) are a mournful meditation on art, art-making and purpose.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2023

I know people who are bored and maddened by Anderson’s films, and I’m increasingly sympathetic to those views. Nevertheless, his methods are so idiosyncratic it would be glib to ever write him off.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2023

While Asteroid City does have some issues, when it comes to its pacing and some plot points, it’s a very quick watch.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2023

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‘Asteroid City’ Review: Wes Anderson’s Cosmic Grief Comedy Is One of His Very Best Movies Yet

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Cannes   Film Festival. Focus Features releases the film in select theaters on Friday, June 16, with expansion to follow on Friday, June 23.

As expected, the world of “Asteroid City” is meticulously arranged with clockwork precision, and — as expected — that world is then populated with memorable characters who try to assert the same degree of control over their own lives. Characters like Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a quietly grieving war photographer waiting for the perfect moment to tell his four young kids that their mom just died, as if there were a correct way to drop that kind of bomb on someone. “The time is never right,” he laments to the father-in-law who never liked him (a wonderfully sour Tom Hanks as Stanley Zak, a pistol always jammed down the front of his shorts). “The time is always wrong,” Stanley replies.

Perhaps the most notable of the many other figures in town for the weekend is famous movie star Midge Campbell (a Scarlett Johansson, in full control of her own star power), who looks like Liz Taylor, takes after Marilyn Monroe, and materializes in the window opposite Augie’s motel room with the cosmic alignment of a solar eclipse. She’s always rehearsing for something, and never misses her cue. Her daughter Dinah, also being fêted in Asteroid City, will inspire a similar awe from Woodrow; par for the course in a film where love and loss orbit around each other in an endless chase, bound together by the gravity shared between them.

Soaking up the “clean light” of the desert sun, Robert Yeoman’s camera reveals most of these sights to us in the span of a single 360-degree swivel, a flex that underlines Anderson’s absolute command over the film’s Chinchón set where his characters will soon be trapped against their will, thus forcing them to surrender the delusion of control that has defined so many of Anderson’s characters over the course of his career. It’s maybe the most radical thing that has ever happened in one of his movies — the sort of transformative moment that A.I. could never dream up no matter how much data it ingested — and it spins “Asteroid City” in a cosmic new direction. What until then was just another immaculate Wes Anderson film suddenly becomes one of a kind. 

Like any Wes Anderson hero worth his salt, Augie Steenbeck is simply hoping to outrun his grief and self-doubt in the hopes that what comes next will magically reveal itself to him like the photographs that he develops in his portable darkroom. “Am I doing him right?,” Augie asks himself in a self-reflexive aside that takes full advantage of the movie’s spectacular framing device, posing the same question that so many of Anderson’s characters are implicitly asking themselves. But then an ellipsis appears in the space above him, interrupting the run-on sentence in Augie’s mind, and in a brilliant flash of green light it becomes clear that he will have to find his own way forward in this world, using the tools and people available to him. After that moment, neither he nor anyone else in Asteroid City will ever be able to shake the feeling that — quoth someone else — we’re all just characters in a play that we don’t understand. 

At first, that context and its subsequent intrusions upon the story — complete with scene headings that let you know exactly where you are in the film and what might be happening next — might feel like the overly fussy directorial flourishes of a filmmaker who’s often accused of indulging in such things at the audience’s expense. But, as is often the case in this filmmaker’s work, the self-reflexive layering is ultimately revealed to be for our benefit. 

And so it goes with many of the characters in a movie that never lets you forget that Scarlett Johansson is an actress playing an actress who’s playing an actress. But if the interstitial scenes in “Asteroid City” are destabilizing by design (in a why is Augie suddenly making out with a Kentucky fried Edward Norton? sort of way), you don’t need an airtight grasp on the mechanics of how everything fits together in order to be knocked flat by the effect of feeling it all click into place. 

This is a film that sneaks up on you — that fools you into thinking it’s just a scattershot collection of discrete little details and gags. There’s Matt Dillon as a deadpan mechanic, and there’s Maya Hawke singing a ditty with Jarvis Cocker, and… is that Bob Balaban hiding in the background over there? Some of the bits and bobs immediately feel like top-flight Anderson (e.g. the high-speed chase that loops through town, Liev Schreiber running around with a purple death ray), while others (the Junior Stargazers’ memory games, Steve Carrell’s ubiquitous hotel manager) left me wondering if “Asteroid City” were spreading itself too thin to mine anything meaningful from the grief comedy at its core. 

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality. Some might see that as self-amused navel-gazing, but the unexpected moment towards the end when Anderson finds a certain equilibrium between those contradictory forces — with a major assist from a movie star whose name you suddenly remember seeing in the credits some 100 minutes earlier — is so crushingly beautiful and well-earned that the artifice surrounding it simply falls away.

Will Augie ever see his wife again? It’s hard to say. But somewhere in Asteroid City, or in the play called “Asteroid City” within the play called “Asteroid City” within the television show whose title we either never learn or instantly forget, he will come to appreciate that death is just another of the great unknowns that we all have to live with in the waking dream we share together; a mystery both as cold as a meteorite at the bottom of a crater, and as infinite as the stars in the night sky above. 

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‘Asteroid City’ Review: Wes Anderson’s New Film Is a Piece of 1950s Desert Americana That’s Visually Dazzling and Dramatically Inert

The director's creation of a tiny desert town is an ingenious act of world-building, but what happens there has the turgid ironic whimsy of Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" and "The Life Aquatic."

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Set in a tiny red-rock Southwest Americana desert town in 1955, it may be the director’s most intricately ornate and fetishistic piece of world-building. Watching the movie, one glories, for a while, in the retro kitsch nostalgia and sheer stylized play that went into the creation of Asteroid City (pop. 87), with its ’40s-meets-’50s diner and motor court and one-pump gas station, its mesas that look like they’re made out of balsa wood, its occasional scrubby cactus, its giant meteorite crater that serves as a tourist attraction, and its intermittent atomic-bomb-test mushroom cloud that goes off in the distance. There are some good jokes, like the row of vending machines that includes one that sells tiny plots of land, as well as archly obvious ones, like the police-vs.-crooks demon car chases that occasionally rip through town.

“Asteroid City” presents itself as a stylized meditation on grief, though it’s not the kind that anyone’s going to shed a tear over. As military officers and astronomers, including the technobabble-happy Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), gather to honor the achievements of the Junior Stargazers (of which Woodrow is one), Augie’s crusty father-in-law ( Tom Hanks ) shows up, and so does Midge Campbell ( Scarlett Johansson ), a movie star with short brown hair, orange lipstick, and her own hostile hauteur. Did I mention that the lead characters are, at the same time, stage actors who are “playing” these very same roles back in New York in a black-and-white teleplay called “Asteroid City,” presented by The Host (Bryan Cranston)? If your reaction to that is “Huh?” you won’t be alone.

At one point, an alien shows up with a disarming look that consists of popping white eyes and skin that looks like it was made out of a black shower curtain. He disappears in his flying saucer as quickly as he arrived, but this extraterrestrial visit results in Asteroid City being placed under quarantine, which means that everyone who has come to town is trapped there. The audience will know just how that feels. “Asteroid City” looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.

Reviewed at Universal Screening Room, May 12, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 104 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Focus Features, Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Picture production. Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson. Executive producers: Roman Coppola, Henning Molfenter, Christoph Fisse, Charlie Woebeken.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Wes Anderson. Camera: Robert Yeoman. Editors: Barney Pilling, Andrew Weisblum. Music: Alexandre Desplat.
• With: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jake Ryan, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Hong Chau, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan, Sophia Lillis, Jeff Goldblum.

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Asteroid City

Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, ... Read all Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever. Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever.

• Wes Anderson
• Roman Coppola
• Jason Schwartzman
• Scarlett Johansson
• 685 User reviews
• 293 Critic reviews
• 76 Metascore
• 3 wins & 79 nominations

Top cast 99+

• Augie Steenbeck

• Midge Campbell

• Stanley Zak

• General Gibson

• Conrad Earp

• Sandy Borden

• (as Stephen Park)

• J. J. Kellogg

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Bill Murray was originally cast in Steve Carell 's role, but contracted COVID-19 shortly before filming. He had to withdraw from the production. This is actually the second time Carell has taken over a role from Murray, as Murray was the first choice for the role of Frank in Little Miss Sunshine (2006) .
• Goofs The newspaper shows a photo of the alien with a shadow, as if taken with a flashbulb, but Augie did not use a flash.

Augie Steenbeck : I still don't understand the play.

Schubert Green : Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

• Crazy credits At the very end of the end credits, over a black screen a voice whispers, "Wicked."
• Alternate versions Theatrically, the film is presented entirely within a 2.39:1 frame; the corresponding academy ratio 1.37:1 scenes are windowboxed within that frame. The Blu-Ray, DVD, and streaming version presents everything within a 1.78:1 framing, letterboxing the 2.39:1 segments and pillarboxing the 1.37:1 segments. The opening Focus Features and Indian Paintbrush logos are presented in full 1.78:1.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: Never Trust the Standing Ovations | CANNES 2023 Indiana Jones, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
• Soundtracks Last Train to San Fernando Written by Sylvester DeVere, Randolph Padmore, Kenneth St. Bernard Performed by Johnny Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys Courtesy of Columbia Records Nashville By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 685

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• Jun 11, 2023

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 45 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital
• 12-Track Digital Sound
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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‘asteroid city’ review: scarlett johansson leads stacked ensemble that gets marooned in cloying wes anderson whimsy.

New additions to the director’s informal repertory company in this cosmic comedy about love, family and precocious geniuses also include Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Hong Chau and Margot Robbie.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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With apologies to Guns N’ Roses: Don’t take me down to the Asteroid City / Where the tropes are tired and the gags ain’t witty / Make it stop (Oh, won’t you please make it stop).

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Premiering in the main Cannes competition ahead of its June 23 release through Focus, the archly cutesy new film joins the ranks of Anderson’s more distancing work, notably The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou .

The writer-director seldom seems more self-satisfied than when he’s spinning his wheels. Anderson has always been like a smart kid playing in a hermetically sealed sandbox of quirky action figures and quaint toys. Here, that’s quite literally the case as he strands a bunch of people in 1955 in a tiny fictitious desert town in the American Southwest with a population of 87, isolating them there after an alien encounter that prompts the government to step in and impose military quarantine.

At the center of all the excitement is a precociously brilliant group of young teenagers accompanied by their parents to a Junior Stargazers convention, where they will be honored for their wacky scientific inventions at a ceremony held in the basin of a huge meteorite crater.

Throw in Tilda Swinton as an eccentric astronomer bestowing an annual scholarship on a lucky space cadet, and what could be more Anderson-esque, right? In theory yes, but it’s hard to engage with characters and situations that feel so studied, so stuck in a script that rarely allows them any emotional development — especially when the director himself seems so removed from them.

Schwartzman and Johansson are the movie’s standouts, bringing an element of poignant yearning and subsumed hurt to their characters. But each time their thread threatens to acquire substance, Anderson cuts away to some pointless vignette or some finicky bit of business that makes the entire over-crowded gallery of characters seem remote.

A big part of that is the over-complicated framing device, a black-and-white Playhouse 90 -type television showcase introduced by an unnamed host (Bryan Cranston), who presents Asteroid City as a play by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), directed by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) and cast with an ensemble plucked from the drama collective of Saltzburg Keitel (Willem Dafoe). The program is a behind-the-scenes tour of the creative process of mounting a play for the stage and the key characters involved all draw loose inspiration from midcentury artists and institutions, like the Actors Studio.

This means we also get mostly unrevealing glimpses of the performers playing roles in the desert play-within-the-TV program. And it allows production designer Adam Stockhausen to get creative with painted backdrops of cactus-dotted flats and rocky mesas and mountains probably made of Styrofoam. But this supposedly rollicking comedy with heart exposes the gulf between clever and fun.

The point of the story — scripted by Anderson from an idea he developed with Roman Coppola — is that human connection, enlightenment and healing are possible even in a climate of deep-rooted paranoia and in the mushroom-cloud shadow of atomic testing. But the notes of poignancy struggle to break through.

Asteroid City made me long for the beautiful sadness afflicting the messed-up family in The Royal Tenenbaums , the adolescent growing pains of Rushmore , the nostalgia for the adventurous spirit of childhood in Moonrise Kingdom or the haunting tragicomedy of The Grand Budapest Hotel , a movie so layered it almost defies a single viewing. Anderson’s latest at times seems indistinguishable from the fan edits and AI-generated parodies of his work that have been sprouting all over TikTok and Twitter.

Among the most underused performers is Hong Chau, given a single scene as the wife walking out on Brody’s serial womanizer, not without regret; and Margot Robbie as the melancholy actress whose scene as Augie’s dead wife was cut from the play. She has a wistful exchange with Jones Hall, the actor playing Augie, from neighboring Broadway theater balconies. Beyond a presumable affection for the director’s work, it’s mystifying what drew Tom Hanks to the disposable role of Augie’s disapproving father-in-law, negotiating an ongoing place in his grandchildren’s lives while remaining open about his dislike for their father.

That latter development involves Jeff Goldblum inhabiting the movement of a spindly stop-motion extraterrestrial perhaps meant to suggest the boundless possibilities of a universe too often regarded with fear. But the presence, while amusing, is not much more meaningful than Goldblum’s interplanetary visitor from Earth Girls Are Easy .

As always with Anderson, the craft elements are impeccable, including Stockhausen’s playfully fake sets, Milena Canonero’s geek-chic vintage costumes and Robert Yeoman’s cinematography, drenched in the dazzling colors of 35mm Kodak film and enlivened by lots of characteristic whip pans, artful symmetrical framing and split-screen interludes. It has to be said, also, that every actor commits 100 percent to the director’s vision, like oddball figurines in a miniature toy world.

The trouble is there’s just not enough here to fully engage the viewer beyond the trademark aesthetics — no emotional pull or lingering feeling and too few genuine laughs. For a movie so curiously weightless it seems awfully pleased with itself, its moments of magic evaporating almost instantaneously.

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'Asteroid City' Review: Wes Anderson's Pastel Alien Encounter Flick Goes All-In on Style

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This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

If there is any director who you can see one frame of their work and identify their style , it's Wes Anderson . Obsessed with rich and colorful palettes, symmetry, detailed sets, and costume design, Anderson's films often look like they've been plucked out of a storybook. In the auteur's latest entry, Asteroid City , we journey to a fictional 1955 in the middle of the Southwest desert in America. In typical Anderson fashion, we have a whole ensemble of characters and multiple storylines all bundled up in his immaculate packaging.

Asteroid City

Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever.

'Asteroid City' Takes on a Different Form of Storytelling

What first stands out when watching Asteroid City is the fact that the actual story we're watching in the desert is a fictional play put on by actors. In other words, the film employs a narrative frame where each of the characters are also playing the part in a play. Visually, Anderson differentiates this by showing us the non-play elements in black-and-white. The characters have different accents, personalities, and names.

Perhaps if this was given more time to marinate, the concept would have been smoother in execution. But given the massive cast we must keep up with, the frame characters end up muddying the waters . It disturbs the flow of the story in Asteroid City, even if it is where we see actors like Willem Dafoe , Adrien Brody , and Hong Chau flourish. Anderson is known for his large ensemble casts, but it feels that perhaps he's stretched himself a bit too thin with Asteroid City .

'Asteroid City' Lacks the Depth of Emotion of Anderson's Classics

While Wes Anderson is undoubtedly a very aesthetic director, his strengths also lie in being able to subtly tell stories filled with emotion . The Royal Tenenbaums , The Grand Budapest Hotel , and Moonrise Kingdom are all examples of his stories that not only incorporate his signature aesthetic style but his signature storytelling style. Oftentimes, he mixes quirkiness with dysfunction and melancholy with dark humor. There might be some that call Anderson's filmmaking shallow, but a closer look at his best works show that every story he creates is multilayered.

Perhaps it's because there is so much to juggle in Asteroid City — a massive cast, two different storylines, a sci-fi element — but there are times when the film is aimless. It meanders from subplot to subplot . We go from Augie's ( Jason Schwartzman ) struggle to deal with a big change in his family to his blossoming romance with actress Midge Campbell ( Scarlett Johansson ) to a surprising arrival by a benign alien. Augie and Midge clearly have the lion's share of character development, though their story gets dwarfed by the arrival of the alien. I almost wonder if it's time for Wes Anderson to make the jump from film to television so he is allowed to develop and accentuate these detailed characters.

Wes Anderson's Style Is on Full Display in 'Asteroid City'

While the narrative has its cracks, the visual aesthetic and appearance of Asteroid City are completely flawless . The beautiful pastels of a Sonoran desert are mixed with the little whimsical touches that Anderson so likes to include in his films. An on-ramp built that goes nowhere, a motor home park with one burned-down cabin, a romance between two people talking to each other from their windows. He cares about the details and it shows. As the stunning azure blue sky turns into a yellow and pink sunset, it's hard to look at Asteroid City and not want to simply fall into this seemingly immaculate world.

This might be Anderson's most beautiful film. Between the looks behind the scenes in a grittier theater stage to the clean and simple beauty of the desert, there's little clutter, only clean lines. And when he includes the alien element, that too is done in a careful stylistic way. When the UFO arrives, it bathes the group in a neon green glow, with the awkward little alien looking totally unthreatening and meek. It's a moment played for laughs that's based completely on physical comedy .

If you like Wes Anderson, Asteroid City is right up your alley . This is more of what you already love, and it's fun to see new actors join Anderson in his cast of familiar collaborators. Actors like Maya Hawke or Margot Robbie or Steve Carell have been Anderson-ified and slot perfectly into his little world. Even if you might be scratching your head at the end of the movie wondering, "What was the point of this?" it still stands head and shoulders above so many films that do the bare minimum compared to the amount of thought that Anderson puts into his films.

Rating: 7/10

Asteroid City is now available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S.

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Review: Wes Anderson’s gorgeous ‘Asteroid City’ is more starry than stellar

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“Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s half-irritating, half-intoxicating desert bloom of a movie, unfolds mostly in 1955 in a small Southwest town — a postcard-perfect oasis surrounded by cactuses, red rocks and vast horizons.

Our first glimpse of it is deeply transporting: No sounds break the silence, and no actors (or tumbleweeds) disrupt the vast spaces of Robert Yeoman’s impeccably framed widescreen compositions. Instead, the camera nimbly rotates nearly 360 degrees, pausing mid-pan to register the glories of Adam Stockhausen’s Wild Wild Wes production design: a diner, a motel, a filling station, a highway ramp to nowhere. That last one is a symbol: of unrealized promise, yes, but also of the-sky’s-the-limit possibility.

Welcome to Asteroid City, a gorgeous piece of scenery even by Anderson’s standards and an open-air museum of antiquarian delights, with its 40-cent milkshakes, vintage vending machines and pastel-hued automobiles. It is also, at this early stage, a museum happily devoid of visitors. Not that you’ll mind when Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright and other familiar and newly minted members of Anderson’s company turn up, bringing with them a swirl of persnickety, precisely choreographed human activity. But there’s something captivating about that early stillness: Asteroid City, we see, is not just a town but a carefully constructed set, and not just a carefully constructed set but the scaffolding for a typically elaborate formal and narrative conceit.

The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth. (My first go-round, at last month’s Cannes Film Festival , tended frustratingly toward the latter; a second viewing proved eye-opening, if a few pans short of a 180-degree reversal.) “Asteroid City,” you see, is not just a movie we’re watching but a “hypothetical play,” in the words of a genial host-narrator (Bryan Cranston), that’s being staged and produced for 1950s television.

It’s an archly overarching framing device delineated by boxily framed black-and-white images and given prominent positioning throughout Anderson’s two-act screenplay (drawn from an idea conceived with his regular collaborator Roman Coppola). Early on, we meet some of the creative forces behind this production, including a Tennessee Williams-ish playwright (Edward Norton) and an Elia Kazan-esque director (Adrien Brody). And then there’s the cast, which is where things get especially meta-tortured: Schwartzman, Johansson, Hanks et al. are actors playing actors (in black-and-white), but they are also actors playing actors playing characters (in color).

For simplicity’s sake, let’s leave aside the behind-the-scenes stuff and treat the play as the thing, which the movie for the most part does. Schwartzman, bearded and moody, is a war photographer named Augie Steenbeck — a surname he shares with the old flatbed editing machines of Hollywood yore, in keeping with this movie’s obsessive retrophilia. He pulls into Asteroid City in a rickety station wagon with three adorably witchy daughters (Ella, Gracie and Willan Faris) and a brainy teenage son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who’s receiving a prize at the town’s annual Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets convention.

You’ll do plenty of stargazing yourself during “Asteroid City,” and not just of the celestial variety. That’s Steve Carell puttering away as the motel’s eager-to-please manager, busily preparing rooms for various harried convention guests played by Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis and Stephen Park. Matt Dillon tools around in an auto garage, Maya Hawke teaches a class of science whizzes, and Rupert Friend sings, plays the guitar and wears beautifully stitched denim.

The most glamorously aloof visitor is Midge Campbell (Johansson), a movie star who’s an amalgam of different movie stars — she’s Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, though seldom all at once — and who has a Junior Stargazer daughter of her own, Dinah (Grace Edwards).

Youthful precocity is a given in Anderson’s movies, as are the stirrings of young love. Woodrow, who soon falls for Dinah, is spiritual kin to the love-struck teenagers in “Moonrise Kingdom,” the neglected geniuses of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and, most of all, the thwarted romantic hero of “Rushmore,” and not just because Schwartzman, who made his screen debut as Max Fischer 25 years ago, is playing his dad.

The Steenbecks themselves are a classically Andersonian fractured family, fluent in the filmmaker’s familiar language of deadpan-melancholy pronouncements but less adept at direct communication. Augie hasn’t yet managed to break the news to his kids that their mother died recently after a long illness. Nor does he have the words to win over his disapproving father-in-law (Tom Hanks, in an affectionate growl of a performance), who comes to Asteroid City to spend some time with his grandchildren.

All this family drama unfolds against a backdrop that, with its local observatory and historic meteorite crater, thrums with technological innovation and postwar possibility. Anderson takes obvious delight in his characters’ ingenuity, mainly because it can serve as a conduit for his own. But that delight is also tempered by anxiety and alarm. If Woodrow and his fellow junior astronomers represent the next generation of scientific minds, the ominous mushroom clouds rising from atomic-test sites suggest something much darker on the horizon. In time, a flying saucer will zip into view, bringing the story’s first act to a close and sending Asteroid City into government-imposed lockdown. As usual, Anderson hurls his characters into a collective crisis that gives rise to individual bursts of resistance and reconciliation.

All of which would be more than enough to occupy your attention even if the movie slowed its tempo, attenuated its gags or paused to give each actor more than a drolly robotic witticism or two. (Blink and you’ll miss Bob Balaban and an especially underused Hong Chau.) But the director, operating by his own laws of compression and acceleration, instead piles layer upon Brechtian layer. In movies like “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and, more recently, “The French Dispatch,” he has insisted on nesting stories within stories, chasing intricate narrative structures that draw on literary and cinematic inspirations alike.

In “Asteroid City,” he adds a third and perhaps even a fourth representational mode to the mix: By focusing on the interlocking worlds of theater and television, he turns an eerie extraterrestrial action-comedy into a series of close encounters of the thespian kind. Even as Asteroid City the fictional town is rocked by alien visitations, “Asteroid City” the TV production must weather its own cataclysms behind the scenes. Anderson and his performers pay witty, self-conscious homage to the groundbreaking work of the Actors Studio in the 1950s — a moment when the heightened theatricality of Old Hollywood was giving way to the subtler psychological realism of the Method.

Method acting, of course, could scarcely be more antithetical to Anderson’s own rigidly mannered performance style, which makes “Asteroid City” a fascinating, sometimes brain-melting collision of aesthetic modes. For Anderson’s admirers — and I count myself among them half the time — that style is a deliberately self-imposed obstacle, one that doesn’t conceal so much as magnify the emotions that his characters feel but can never properly express. On that logic, is it a flaw that so many of the great if familiar faces in this ensemble leave so little impression? Or is it a kind of trade-off, one that allows the movie’s two stellar leads, Schwartzman and Johansson, to leave as poignant an impression as they do?

One of the movie’s most wistfully lovely scenes finds Augie and Midge carrying on a window-to-window conversation from neighboring motel rooms, discussing their lives, their losses and especially their art. Their professional commiseration tilts into a kind of chaste (at first) seduction; in Anderson’s world, what people do is all but inextricable from who they are. The scene becomes more affecting still when it’s echoed, sometime later, outside a New York soundstage — and you begin to see, if only for a moment, the meaning in Anderson’s relentless visual and narrative symmetries, the beauty in his incessantly toggling design.

Scientists and artists, he suggests, are driven and indeed united by the same restlessly inventive spirit, the same desperate desires for human connection. That notion admittedly comes together more coherently in your head afterward than it does on the screen in front of you, which isn’t necessarily a knock. Some great movies do play better in the memory, even if “Asteroid City,” light-fingered and leaden by turns, never quite ascends into their company. It soars, stalls and sometimes alienates. It also lands on a conclusion as moving as it is undeniable: We are not alone.

‘Asteroid City’

Rating: PG-13 on appeal, for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes Playing: Starts June 16 at AMC Burbank 16; AMC Burbank Town Center 6

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Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson prizes style over substance in an allegory for storytelling

Though Asteroid City delivers heady philosophical concepts and exquisite visual mastery, it's short on cohesive storytelling. But it almost doesn't matter given the film's attempt to allegorize narrative.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

"Don't worry about it, just keep telling the story."

So says Adrien Brody 's director Schubert Green when Jones Hall ( Jason Schwartzman ) frets that he doesn't understand the play (within the movie) that he is currently starring in. It could also be the mantra of Asteroid City and the entire oeuvre of director Wes Anderson .

For Asteroid City — in theaters June 16 with a wider release June 23 — isn't merely a mid-century Southwestern jewel box of Americana as diffused through Anderson's piquant eye. It is also an American Playhouse-style black-and-white special detailing the 1950s Actors' Studio approach to writing and mounting the "play" we are predominantly viewing.

Anderson, who directed and co-wrote the film, has always used a Matryoshka doll-esque approach to his storytelling, the layers of his masterfully designed sets and vast ensemble casts collapsing and expanding with the precision of a Mozart symphony. But Anderson compounds that tiered confectionary storytelling structure here, in his 11th feature, with this play-within-a-TV-special-within-a-movie framework.

The special's host, as played by a stentorian Bryan Cranston who seems to be channeling some combination of his stage work in All the Way and Network, wants us to remember that Asteroid City is also a fiction, the drama and ensuing mythology around its mounting as false as the Monument Valley-esque peaks in the background of the titular city.

The plot of the special revolves around dissolute playwright Conrad Earp ( Edward Norton ) attempting to write and perfect the play, Asteroid City , while the play itself is focused on a Southwestern town whose annual Junior Stargazer convention is upended by the sudden appearance of an alien.

Schwartzman, an Anderson regular, is New York actor Jones Hall, uncertain of his grasp on the play Asteroid City. Within the play, he is widowed war photographer Audie Steenbeck. Schwartzman has always been adept at playing the tragic clown and here, he might give his most wistful performance yet as an actor struggling to understand a play about a man who can only make sense of the world through his camera lens.

He stars opposite Scarlett Johansson 's Mercedes Ford, a veteran NY stage actress, who is portraying Midge Campbell, a mid-century movie star in the vein of Elizabeth Taylor or Susan Hayward. Johansson has made something of a career of playing brassy women of this era in projects such as Hail, Caesar! and Jojo Rabbit . But she elevates that to a new level here, barely tamping down Midge's inner melancholy, while also fully giving herself over to the melodramatic tableaus she enacts in her bungalow bathroom.

Johansson and Schwartzman give two stellar performances within a galaxy of gripping ensemble work that treads the line between pastiche and pathos with ease. There's no shortage of films set in the 1940s and '50s, movies that try to replicate the rat-a-tat patter of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But often, contemporary actors feel like they're playing dress-up, their all-too modern selves packaged in the trappings of the time.

One might think that would feel even more the case within the purposeful artifice of Anderson's world — the meticulously framed tableaus; the exquisite Southwestern sets that feel more like Disneyland than the real world; and the comedic language of the tilts, pans, and close-ups of his camera.

What can be said that hasn't been already about the visual style of Anderson's filmmaking (so recognizable that it's a meme )? Suffice it to say that Asteroid City both meets and exceeds the sumptuous artistry and fastidious invention of his previous work.

The deliberate contrivance of the world of the play, Asteroid City , feels more akin to the filmmaking of the era that Anderson is probing than other recent projects that aim for naturalistic verisimilitude to the time. It's clear that's entirely by design when you juxtapose the play's brightly lit exteriors, which conjure a classic studio's overexposed approach to natural light, with the black-and-white classic aspect-ratio realism of the TV special that details the making of the play.

The plays — and artists — that defined Broadway in the '40s and '50s (and reinvented the American theater) were about truth and realism. For artists engaged in the "Method," like the ones we see in a class near the film's conclusion, a good performance is less about acting than it is about being . Yet, the films that built Hollywood and coalesced the concept of movie-making are steeped in a purposeful disconnect between reality and fantasy. There's a reason they called the studios "dream factories."

With Asteroid City, Anderson seems to be philosophizing about that gap between the truth we seek in storytelling and the lush, bravura craftsmanship required to tell it. Asteroid City isn't in any way a cohesive story; it plays as a series of vignettes that don't necessarily build to any grand climax or clear purpose. But like Brody's Schubert instructs Schwartzman's Jones, it isn't really about reaching some greater sense of understanding anyway. Just keep telling the story. (Though admittedly, Anderson seems to care more about theory and style than narrative at this point in his career.)

Near the film's conclusion, the acting students with whom Conrad Earp meets are seized by the mania of repeating the mantra: "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." It could be dismissed as "Method" pretension, but it's also potentially the thesis statement of the film and Anderson's views on storytelling as a whole — to find the truth in art, you have to give yourself over to the artifice of the dream. Grade: B

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Wes Anderson’s new movie Asteroid City is his most expansive — and most personal

Life, the universe, and everything, through both the telescope and the microscope.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Nuclear bombs keep going off over the horizon of Asteroid City (population 87). “Another atom bomb test,” the characters declare, with some combination of intrigue and boredom. They trot out of the diner to look at the tiny mushroom cloud, snap a few pictures, and go back inside for more coffee. It’s 1955. This isn’t unusual anymore.

Living in the shadow of the bombs is what Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is about — literal bombs, and also a host of other life-shattering things like loss, and existential dread, and a world changing so fast it’s hard to hang on to it. Real things, in other words, the kind everyone has to deal with. The emotions we can’t outrun, but we try to anyhow.

That Anderson set Asteroid City in 1955 is a bit of trickery, a degree of separation between the characters’ reality and our own. We live in (dare I say) uniquely frightening times, but so do these people, for whom the Cold War and a rapidly changing social order is their psychic wallpaper. Much of the movie is specifically set in September 1955, a month bookended by two events: the United States’ decision to embark on Project Vanguard, which would try unsuccessfully to beat the Soviets at putting a satellite into space; and the tragic car accident that took the life of James Dean, the iconic actor who embodied the rising rebellion of the youth. (I don’t think it’s an accident that a cop car in hot pursuit of a careening vehicle keeps rushing through the town’s one intersection.)

“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born,” General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) exhorts a crowd of teenagers and their parents, assembled in Asteroid City to celebrate the landing of a meteorite there thousands of years earlier. The children have entered their wildly advanced science experiments in a contest, which the military plans to snap up; the space race is in their eyes. Later, when things go south, youths are interrogated in a manner suspiciously reminiscent of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Grown men fight, and others try to calm them down by reminding them, “We’re not in Guadalcanal anymore.”

It feels reminiscent of something real, but this is also all fiction — as the movie’s narrator puts it, “an apocryphal fabrication.” Fiction puts a layer between us and real history, a way of looking at the past through different eyes. It has another function, too: Through fiction, we process our emotions by proxy, whether we’re the artists or the audience.

That’s the subject of Asteroid City , which nests fiction inside of fiction inside of fiction. (I promise it’s easier to watch than it sounds.) Here is the most succinct description of the levels of its made-up-ness: It is a scripted movie that pretends to be a TV show in which actors stage a fictionalized version of the making of a play telling the fictional story of a place that doesn’t exist. We also see the play, but it is shot like a movie. (I am Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.)

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The central, in-color plot of the film centers on the group gathered in Asteroid City for a three-day meteorite celebration when their lives are upended by a, shall we say, unexpected visitor. But Asteroid City actually introduces itself to us as an old-school anthology TV show , shot in black and white, hosted by a sonorous host (Bryan Cranston). What we’re about to see, he gravely tells us, is the story behind the making of a play called Asteroid City , about a place that doesn’t exist. It’s both an apocryphal fabrication and an “authentic look into the work of a theatrical production.”

What follows intercuts the color story — which turns out to be kind of a hyperreal version of the “play,” which we see shot as a film — and black-and-white scenes, often staged like little mini-plays, about various moments during Asteroid City ’s production. (The play, not the movie we’re watching. If you need a walk or a stiff drink right now, that’s fine.)

This all means that in this movie Scarlett Johansson, for instance, plays an actress who plays an actress playing an actress. Similarly, Jason Schwartzman — the closest to a lead this absurdly stacked cast has — plays an actor who is desperate to figure out the motivations of his character, a war photographer who burns his hand on a sandwich iron. (Schwartzman is styled to reference several famous actors, perhaps most significantly a very famous photo of James Dean.)

Piling on these layers, each with its own combination of artifice and “authenticity,” is where Anderson shows what he’s doing. He’s interested in those piles. The impossible pursuit of authentic emotion through making art that can never really be all that “real” is one of Asteroid City ’s themes; a fair amount of the film dwells on an acting class and its students, who are trying, in the style of The Actors Studio and “the method,” to find ways to give authentic performances in the very contrived medium of the theater.

But there’s an added layer to what Anderson’s after. Humans have always processed their feelings through art, but modernity adds a wrench to the whole existence thing. There’s an aspect of alienation — of feeling as if the machines and inventions we build, which are terrifying enough to be able to wipe us out (like the bomb) or seemingly to take over our world altogether (like, say, generative AI), are estranging us from one another and even from ourselves. Art has always been the counterbalance to this, which is in part why groups like The Actors Studio sprung up in the early part of the 20th century. If you are working at a desk all day clacking on a typewriter, or operating a machine, or building a bureaucracy that might work like a machine, then going to the theater is supposed to jolt you back to remembering that you, at least, are not a machine.

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It’s tantamount to either a confession or an explanation from someone like Anderson, whose work employs considerable artifice in its pursuit of authenticity. I confess that I don’t really like Anderson’s style, and have not loved most of his movies . It took me two viewings to really figure out Asteroid City . But I do admire that he’s an artist whose aesthetic is so firmly defined that even non-cinephiles can make poor imitations of his work using AI; in fact, it’s those replicas’ inability to actually latch onto the emotion that powers his work (the melancholy, the grief, the impishness) that make me appreciate him more.

That’s what I came to appreciate about this movie, and the more I think about it, the more wise I think it is. In Asteroid City , Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble. Their worlds are rocked, which leaves them thinking about things like the meaning of life, the existence of God, and whether they’re as alone as they feel like they are. The answer, he suggests, is found by sinking into the apocryphal fabrications of the artist’s imagination. “You can’t wake up,” the characters chant near the end of the movie, “if you don’t fall asleep.”

Asteroid City is playing in theaters.

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Asteroid City Review: Wes Anderson's Big-Hearted Masterpiece

The director’s latest film–and maybe even greatest–is full of stars, style, and mournful searching.

Wes Anderson is a man of many loves. Among them, of course, are undersized suits , symmetrical compositions, and precocious children. But often overlooked is his love for lodging his stories in structural nesting dolls. He tends to frame them, for instance, as novels , remembrances , or magazines . These devices serve several functions: they’re nods to his inspirations, explanations for his aesthetic and narrative fabulism, and, sometimes, meta-commentary on the act of storytelling.

That play is Asteroid City . After introducing its author, Conrad Earp (Ed Norton), and the main cast, the movie bursts with magnificent, pastel-hued color, Johnny Duncan’s grainy skiffle tune “Last Train to San Fernando” comes galloping on, and we’re transported via freight train to Asteroid City, an 87-person desert town in the American Southwest.

Anderson, both the consummate sentimentalist and sensualist, delights in depicting—and, yes, embellishing—the iconic emblems of the West. Besides the freight train, there are roadrunners and tumbleweeds, Close Encounters -esque rock formations, a luncheonette serving bright pie and tall ice cream sundaes, and a motel with vending machines dispensing everything from martinis to land deeds. As cynical as modern audiences may be about America, it’s hard to resist being swept up in Anderson’s—or, rather, Earp’s—vision of it. (I’ll say it: Trains are cool!)

But we’re not in Asteroid City merely to marvel at all the midcentury Americana. The town is playing host to the Junior Stargazers Convention. Which is why Augie Steenbeck (an out-of-this-world Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer and recent widower, is here with his four children. His eldest, Woodrow (an equally fantastic Jake Ryan), is one of five young brainiacs being honored for their inventions—his is a device that projects images on the moon.

Augie, like all of the characters we meet in Asteroid City, is a role within a role. Schwartzman’s Jones Hall (a bohemian, James Dean type) dons a sturdy beard, is always squinting in the sun, and speaks in terse sentences, jaw clenched like Stanley Kubrick—all choices that reflect a form of postwar masculinity rooted in erecting walls and suppressing feelings. At first, when Augie casually uses a gas pump to ignite an empty lighter and smoke his cigarette, it all seems like classically cool and clever Andersonian affectation. But there’s a simmering sense of malaise drifting through the desert air, embodied foremost in Augie. Not just because he’s seen some things overseas. We soon learn that Augie’s wife died three weeks ago, and he still hasn’t told his children. “It’s always the wrong time,” his country club father-in-law ( Tom Hanks ) tells him over the phone. Which is to say: Just do it .

No matter how much you want to know the answers to the deepest mysteries of the universe, you probably won’t ever find them—or, for that matter, be satisfied by them.

As their busted car is being repaired, Augie finally sits the kids down in the hot sand and breaks the news: Mom’s in the tupperware. Woodrow suspected it. The three young girls can’t fully get their heads around it. Since its nature is so internal and varied, grief is a hard thing to portray on screen—or on the stage, for that matter. Credit to Earp; his play doesn’t overdo it. There aren’t a lot of tears, nor talk of feelings. But also, credit to the actors: You can feel the weight of the loss, and sense them pushing it down. If anything, the reality of death provokes a quiet, sullen searching.

All the more so when—time for spoilers—the alien visits. This, I should say, is at the end of Act I, as all the kids and their parents are viewing the “Astronomical Ellipses” (... Wes ) through mirrored cardboard box contraptions. A green glow engulfs the celestial punctuation, and everyone removes their box and watches as a lanky alien descends from a UFO… and snatches the town’s asteroid. Augie snaps a picture—which, naturally, the alien poses for. ( Wes!! )

It’s a playful scene, and one that is, like much of this movie, very funny. But it’s also a turning point. Various characters have moments of earnest reflection; the visitation is something of an existential Rorschach. Augie worries that the alien looked at them “like we’re doomed.” Woodrow wonders if the existence of aliens indicates that there is indeed a meaning of life. One of the other young brainiacs (played by Aristou Meehand, with shades of Max Fisher) hypothesizes that he’s always wanting to be dared to do things because “I’m afraid no one will notice my existence.”

Offstage, the actors are similarly flailing for meaning. “I still don’t understand the play,” Schwartzman’s Jones Hall tells the director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody, of course), after his character purposefully burns his hand on a Quicky-Griddle while flirting with movie star Midge Campbell (a note-perfect Scarlett Johansson).

“It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story,” Green responds.

For such a meticulous director, there’s a palpable sense that Anderson (along with co-writer Roman Coppola) is giving himself over to intuition in Asteroid City —not so much in his precise-as-ever blocking and immaculate set design, as in how he allows the story to unfold. Earp’s play may be divided into three acts, but Anderson takes a looser, more poetic approach to narrative, paying little mind to characters’ wants or any sort of classic hero’s journey. After all, life doesn’t move that way; we’re constantly feeling around in the dark, dreaming and waking. Brainiac or not, no matter how much you want to know the answers to the deepest mysteries of the universe, you probably won’t ever find them—or, for that matter, be satisfied by them. So, maybe what’s left is having fun, making art with your troupe, and moving through the world with the sort of spunk and wit that Anderson loves to instill in his child characters?

The movie’s emotional climax comes during a gut-wrenching scene backstage, in which Jones Hall vents his uncertainty to the character who would’ve played his wife had her scene not been cut—and then, in the play, when the children bury their mother for good. For me, the key to the movie occurs earlier—when the alien returns the asteroid and ecstatic chaos breaks out. The Junior Stargazers had previously been brainstorming the most meaningful symbol to project onto the moon, with Woodrow saying, “This is our chance to be actually worthwhile.” When the moment comes, rather than an American flag or a religious symbol, Woodrow projects a heart with his initials and his new girlfriend’s initials in it.

It’s played as a joke. But really, in the mad frenzy of life, what could be more beautiful and worthwhile than declaring your love to someone you’ve only known a week for all the universe to see?

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Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson’s dazzling technicolor dream

“Asteroid City is an ambitious, dazzling, and occasionally perplexing film from writer-director Wes Anderson.”

• Robert Yeoman's stunning cinematography
• Jason Schwartzman's moving lead performance
• A strong collection of scene-stealing supporting performances
• A labyrinthine plot that's a bit too complicated for its own good
• An abstract structure that keeps certain characters (and their stories) at a distance

Nobody loves a contradiction as much as Wes Anderson. The acclaimed writer-director has built his career telling stories about characters whose lives emotionally oppose their often perfectly manicured settings. Whether it be a hotel concierge whose belief in the power of common courtesy directly contradicts the fascistic political wave of his time or a pair of innocent kids who vow their love to each other even in the face of their adult guardians’ crumbling marriages and heartsick affairs, Anderson’s filmography is populated by all kinds of living contradictions.

There is, perhaps, no filmmaker alive who is better at exploring how our interior and exterior lives can become at odds with each other. It’s no surprise then that his latest film, Asteroid City , focuses on a collection of emotionally lost characters who end up quarantined in a desert town that’s so small it’d be impossible to physically lose your way in — a fact that’s made hilariously clear in an opening 360 degree shot that concisely establishes the entire layout of the film’s central roadside destination. Here, the grand contradiction of Anderson’s characters’ lives is obvious, and not just to us, but to them as well. Their often looney antics are, in turn, brought to gloriously bright, technicolor life here by Anderson and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

The film’s story focuses partially on a group of parents and kids who travel in 1955 to “Asteroid City,” a one-stop American desert town, for a Junior Stargaze convention that gets surprisingly hijacked by the arrival of an alien presence. What emerges from this plot is not only Anderson’s first real sci-fi effort, but also the most ambitious film he’s made since 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel . This time around, the filmmaker isn’t just interested in exploring how we can get turned around in even the most precisely constructed of worlds, but how easily we can find ourselves lost in between the lines of a story, regardless of what our role is in it.

Asteroid City is, like The Grand Budapest Hotel before it, a nesting-doll film. In its black-and-white, Twilight Zone -esque prologue, a TV host (Bryan Cranston) explains that the technicolor events of Asteroid City are not real, but are, in fact, the cinematic visualization of a stage play titled “Asteroid City.” Together, the film’s black-and-white and color sequences recreate not only the play known as “Asteroid City,” but also the creation and production of the play itself. To put that another way: Scarlett Johansson isn’t actually playing Midge Campbell in Asteroid City . She’s playing Mercedes Ford, a Broadway actress who has been hired to play herself playing Midge Campbell.

If this all sounds a bit confusing, that’s because it is, but Anderson doesn’t let the endless layers of Asteroid City drag it down. Before long, its various levels of reality have collapsed in on themselves to the point that the film’s fictional actors and the characters they’ve been hired to play feel interchangeable — except in the rare moments they’re not meant to. Visually, Anderson and Yeoman use the black-and-white palette of the film’s Broadway scenes to separate them from its technicolor sequences, which represent the actual dramatization of Asteroid City ’s eponymous play.

Anderson, for his part, uses the production of the film’s fictional play, as well as the play itself, to explore how the artistic process can force one to question oneself and their emotions the same way life can. Here, the filmmaker posits that an actor’s questions about their role ultimately aren’t all that different from the questions we ask ourselves in moments of overwhelming confusion and grief. It’s a testament to how well Anderson pulls this trick off in Asteroid City that, when one character suddenly asks “Am I playing him right?” aloud, it’s initially unclear whether it’s one of the film’s Broadway actors questioning their performance or a grief-stricken father wondering how badly he’s failing his kids.

At the center of Asteroid City ’s play-within-a-play-within-a-teleplay is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer who journeys with his three daughters and son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), to Asteroid City so that Woodrow can participate in the town’s annual Junior Stargazer convention. While there, Augie tells his kids that their mother passed away three weeks prior and that he hasn’t had the nerve to tell them since then. In the days that follow, Augie not only reunites with his father-in-law ( A Man Called Otto ‘s Tom Hanks ), but also strikes up an unexpected romance with Johannson’s Midge, a popular movie star who arrives in Asteroid City with her daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards), another Junior Stargazer.

Everything goes a bit haywire for everyone in Asteroid City when they witness an unprecedented alien event, which causes the government forces present in town (led by Jeffrey Wright’s hilariously uptight General Grif Gibson) to place them under a mandatory quarantine. Plenty of typically Andersonian comedic gags follow, including an argument involving a death ray and a disgruntled father (Liev Schrieber, at his most gloriously irritable) that prompts a marvelously funny line reading from Hanks. Along the way, Anderson also packs in enough moments of awkward flirtation and youthful curiosity to make Asteroid City his most sweetly romantic film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom .

As humorous as much of Asteroid City is, it’s Schwartzman who ensures that the film doesn’t stray too far from the Earth. One of Anderson’s oldest and most reliable performers, Schwartzman is given the chance here to join his director’s long list of wounded, emotionally distant father figures. With his often glazed eyes and monotonal line delivery, Schwartzman plays Augie as a man who feels profoundly untethered from the life he once had, which only makes the character’s shared grief with Hanks’ acerbic Stanley all the more tragic. Their sympathetic, contradictory dynamic is illustrated best in one early scene when Augie tells Stanley that he hasn’t told his kids about their mother’s death because “the time is never right.” Stanley, in response, tells him, “the time is always wrong.”

Anderson props up Schwartzman with a bevy of note-perfect supporting performances, specifically those given by Johansson, Hanks, Wright, Tilda Swinton, and Margot Robbie, who shows up in just one scene, but gives a clutch hitter performance for the ages. While not everyone in Asteroid City is quite as unmoored as Schwartzman’s Augie, they’re all searching for answers about themselves that they may never find. Midge, for instance, wonders aloud at one point whether her habit of playing depressed, suicidal characters stems from the fact that she herself is depressed and suicidal or that she isn’t. Asteroid City doesn’t reveal whether Midge ever solves that riddle, and her questions aren’t the only ones that go unanswered in the film.

Here, Anderson seems less interested in the answers to his characters’ situations than he does in the questions that plague them. In Asteroid City , the filmmaker embraces the unknowability of certain mysteries, insisting that uncertainty should never be a barrier to entry. “Trust your curiosity,” Swinton’s adult scientist says to one of the film’s Junior Stargazers during a key scene, bridging the gap between Asteroid City ’s space age setting and its introspective story of life in transition. Later, when a group of actors all proclaim that “you can’t wake up if you never fall asleep,” Asteroid City ’s interest in our lives’ various detours and pit stops becomes vibrantly clear.

In typical Anderson fashion, Asteroid City ’s characters aren’t afraid to look each other in the eye. But looking at others isn’t nearly as difficult as turning that same unblinking gaze upon ourselves. Asteroid City knows this. It also knows that self-reflection, no matter how painful, is necessary. Even if we never find any satisfactory answers to the questions we have about ourselves and the universe, Asteroid City argues that there is value in searching for them, the same way there is value in losing and getting lost. Sometimes, the mere act of returning to oneself is reward enough. After all, you can’t get started again if you never stop, and you can’t wake up if you never fall asleep.

Asteroid City is now playing in theaters.

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Flux Gourmet exists in its own strange world, one where concepts like “good taste” and “bad taste” do not seem to exist.

Written and directed by cult British filmmaker Peter Strickland, the new film plays squarely by its own rules from start to finish, digging deeper and deeper into a world where performance art, food, sexual politics, and shame-inducing bouts of excessive flatulence (yes, you read that correctly) all intersect. Rarely, if ever, does Flux Gourmet stop to explain itself, and while another director might have chosen to make the film’s cast of characters the members of an underground movement, Strickland chooses to let them play in the sun above ground.

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Wes Anderson Has Gone Mad

This review originally published in May out of the Cannes Film Festival. We are recirculating it now that Asteroid City is in theaters.

To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or has bought into his press to an absurd degree. Those fussy arrangements, symmetric compositions, and precise tracking shots that have become the stuff of viral videos and snarky social-media memes aren’t going away. While other filmmakers might answer their critics by branching out and shaking things up, Anderson, like Federico Fellini before him, doubles down on his stylistic peculiarities. My colleague Alison Willmore (accurately) called his last effort, The French Dispatch , “the most Wes Anderson movie Wes Anderson has ever made.” One could probably say the same for each new Anderson film and certainly for the marvelous Asteroid City , which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

There’s a point to all this indulgence. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain. The regimented universe of Moonrise Kingdom is sent into a spiraling decline by the mania of young love. The Mitteleuropaïsch candy-box milieu of The Grand Budapest Hotel is undone by the creeping evil of authoritarianism. The romantic, Continental fascinations of The French Dispatch are hit with protest, injustice, and violence. Asteroid City might be the purest expression of this dynamic because it’s about the unknown in all its forms. Death, the search for God, the creation of art, the exuberance of love, the mysteries of the cosmos — in Anderson’s telling, they’re all facets of the same thing.

Asteroid City takes place in September 1955, at a mid-century moment when everything seemed possible. Even if that spirit of optimism was belied by reality: World War II is in the rearview mirror, but its traumas persist, and the mushroom clouds in the distance suggest a potentially more menacing future ahead. Those explosions come from an atomic testing facility not too far from Asteroid City, population 83, a town that is itself the very definition of an in-between place, a collection of motel bungalows built near a 100-foot meteor crater, “halfway between Parched Gulch and Arid Plains.”

Bold curiosity is in the air, as this dead-end ghost town has been overrun by Young Stargazers and Space Cadets, a group of teens and their families who have gathered for a contest thrown by the U.S. military and the local observatory. Among the families are the Steenbecks, led by widowed war-photographer father Augie (Jason Schwartzman), who hasn’t yet told his kids that their mom died several weeks ago. (“The time is never right.”) As in so many Anderson films, the kids are precocious introverts, while the adults are comically haunted. As Augie’s teenage brainiac son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), starts to fall for Dinah (Grace Edwards), a 15-year-old botany wizard, Augie falls for her mother, Hollywood actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Flaunting a black eye for research purposes, the actress warns the war photographer in advance that she plays “tragic, abused alcoholics” and that she’ll probably one day be discovered dead in a bathtub surrounded by pills.

Anderson’s films have become more diffuse over the years with an ever-expanding dramatis personae, a particularly apt term in this case since we’re told that what we’re watching is really a theater piece written by the legendary American playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The film actually begins on a black-and-white television stage with the story narrated by a Rod Serling–like Host, played by Bryan Cranston. (So, really, it’s a play within a play within a TV production within a movie.) The Host reminds us that “ Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for the purposes of this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.” In other words, the story itself is a phantom, unknowable.

At various points, Anderson cuts back to the “actors” playing several of the aforementioned parts. Not unlike the people they’re portraying, they too wrestle with their own fears of the unknown. They are also in 1955, at a moment when the work of the Actors Studio was transforming Hollywood and craft and discipline were taking a back seat to the animating secrets of the soul. The neurotic, fresh-faced Jones Hall (also played by Schwartzman, naturally) struggles with how to accurately depict Augie’s grief. But in his lostness, we learn, lies the actor’s genius.

The audacity and beauty of Asteroid City lie in the way it connects the mysteries of the human heart to the secrets of science and the universe. When the visitors to Asteroid City encounter an actual alien, it sends their world into a tailspin, both altering their very notions of reality and driving them even further into their prior assumptions. (In the face of the unknown, it turns out, we cling even more to our identities.) The visitation also disrupts Anderson’s ornate cinematic world, as the movie becomes faster, stranger, funnier, warmer — almost as if the filmmaker himself were rummaging through his material, desperately searching for an explanation to the mysteries he’s unearthed.

Late in the movie, Jones steps away from playing Augie and runs into the actress (Margot Robbie) who was to play the part of his wife but was reportedly cut from the finished piece. As the two recall the scene they would have had together, the Andersonian whimsy slips away to reveal a perfect moment: two people communing with the messiness of life through their memory of a scene that doesn’t exist, from a play that never happened, presented within a theatrical-cinematic fiction pretending to be a TV show. I cried like a baby. There has always been a method to Wes Anderson’s madness, but Asteroid City reminds you that there is also a madness to his method. And that, ultimately, is what makes him a great artist.

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In “Asteroid City,” Humans Can Leave Impact Craters, Too

Like pretty much everything about the new Wes Anderson film, “Asteroid City,” the title is a joke. Asteroid City is not a city but a dusty town, a stone’s throw from the middle of nowhere, with a population of eighty-seven, a luncheonette, and a motel where you can get milk, Martinis, and real estate from vending machines. And what crashed in this remote spot, nearly five thousand years ago, was not an asteroid but a meteorite, the size of a crystal ball. So, who shows up here, in the course of the plot? Apart, that is, from the widower with his late wife’s ashes in a Tupperware bowl, the blazing Hollywood star, the eccentric kids and their futuristic inventions (not least a functioning ray gun), the warbling cowboys, and the government agents who plunge everyone into quarantine? Nobody, really. Unless that green glow in the film’s trailer turns out to be an alien spaceship, bearing someone, or something, who stops to pose for a picture. But that would be absurd.

The year is 1955, an era when a merry mushroom cloud can billow upward, in the background, signalling the test of an atomic bomb, without causing undue alarm. The widower is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a pipe-smoking war photographer. He has three little daughters, a precocious son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and a car that just broke down. Also staying in Asteroid City is Midge Campbell ( Scarlett Johansson ), a famous actress who reduces lesser mortals to mutterings of awe, and her daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards). In a neat romantic arrangement, Dinah falls for Woodrow, with whom she shares a penchant for the extraterrestrial, while Augie loses his heart to Midge. Their courtship is largely conducted across the space between two motel cabins; this allows them to be framed in windows, as if they were stuck in their own private movies.

The framing does not end there. “Asteroid City,” we learn, owes its existence to a stage play, written by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whose creative labors are described to us by a narrator (Bryan Cranston). How, precisely, the film locks into the play, why we first see the play on a TV monitor, and whether it’s the same play that is overseen by a debonair director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), are narrative niceties that must await clarification from viewers much smarter than me. I was content, more or less, to sit back in dumb delight, and to savor the textural contrast between the black-and-white crispness of the theatre scenes and the powdery, sherbet-like colors, loud but never deep, in which Asteroid City is steeped. Of particular note is the aquamarine that pops up everywhere—overlaid with a pattern of pink diamonds, if you please, on the pants heroically sported by Tom Hanks, in his role as Augie’s father-in-law, Stanley Zak.

The movie, believe it or not, was shot in Spain. But can you believe? Are those genuine roads, leading out of Asteroid City, and do they stretch to an actual horizon? The pastel flatness of the landscape, as an arena for spasms of nuttiness, is akin to that of Pixar’s “Cars” saga or a Road Runner cartoon—a kinship made explicit by the roadrunner that hops in and out of sight. Beep-beep! You could try cataloguing Anderson’s references to other works of art (not just films), but beware: your quest, like Wile E. Coyote’s, is doomed from the start. The opening credits, during which a train hustles through the desert, pay blatant tribute to those of “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), the only slight kink being that Anderson’s train is ferrying avocados and a nice, ripe nuclear warhead. A caution on the side reads “ Do Not Detonate ,” which happens to be the title of a batch of recent screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image, devised to herald the release of “Asteroid City.” The films included “Ace in the Hole” (1951), “The Misfits” (1961), and, yes, “Bad Day at Black Rock.”

All of which will leave some prospective moviegoers asking, “You mean we have to do homework ?” Others will be less concerned by what went into “Asteroid City” than by what emerges at the other end. All the characters seem to have attended Anderson School, so to speak, where the need for underreaction, clipped and quick, has been drummed into them; that would explain why Augie’s young daughters barely flinch, let alone cry, when they hear of their mother’s demise. Such a conceit—that emotions can be as stylized as clothes—is not a fault so much as a sly strategy. (You encounter it all the time in Restoration comedy.) Now and then, however, I couldn’t help yearning for the tough, sombre inhabitants of “Bad Day at Black Rock”: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin. When Tracy, one-armed and clad in funereal black, strikes Borgnine and sends him reeling through the doorway of a bar, with Ryan holding steady at the pinball machine beside them, the director, John Sturges, positions his figures with Andersonian care, but there’s a meaty moral tension in the fray. These guys are not fooling. Who, in “Asteroid City,” can make that sort of impact?

Scarlett Johansson, that’s who. In most Anderson films, someone stands out from the ensemble; remember how “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) was warmed by the recklessness of Ralph Fiennes. Even if you regard the latest movie as a box of tricks, you have to admire the nerve with which Johansson, as Midge, delves into that box and plucks out scraps of coolly agonized wit. More deftly than anyone else, she traffics in the to-and-fro between the real and the imagined. Lounging in her bath, one arm flung over the rim, she’s a Cold War reboot of “The Death of Marat,” by Jacques-Louis David; elsewhere, she’s costumed and coiffed à la Kim Novak in “Vertigo” (1958). Midge’s lipstick is a shade of pale fire, sometimes paired with a black eye, which is the result not of true violence but, as she admits, a dab of greasepaint—preparation for an acting job, or a fearful sign that, soon enough, fate will take another swing at her? Casually, she mentions having known cruel men, and, when she refers to herself and Augie as “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of their pain because we don’t want to,” something in this orderly, scholarly, and hypervigilant movie cracks open. It’s not just meteorites, or aliens, that land in Asteroid City. Humans can leave a crater, too.

Another dry land, another unregarded town, another stack of quirky folk who meet with a mystery. John Slattery’s “Maggie Moore(s),” whose title might prove too fussy even for Wes Anderson, was filmed in New Mexico, and the atmosphere is parched and desperate. Jon Hamm—Slattery’s comrade-in-arms from “Mad Men”—plays a police chief named Sanders. As he and his deputy, Reddy (Nick Mohammed), inspect a charred corpse in a burned-out car, the acrid nastiness catches in your throat.

As with “Asteroid City,” there’s a nagging sense, in “Maggie Moore(s),” of different stories being bundled into a single movie. On the one hand, we have murder most foul: two women, both named Maggie Moore (Mary Holland and Louisa Krause), are found dead, and suspicion falls on their respective husbands, Jay (Micah Stock) and Andy (Christopher Denham). On the other hand, there is circumstantial evidence of love. One of the victims has a next-door neighbor named Rita Grace (Tina Fey), who interrupts the investigation by inviting Sanders to dinner. After a couple of dates, they go to bed. She asks, “Are you ready”—pause—“for the sex?” The answer is no.

What’s remarkable is the sight of Hamm and Fey, who held center stage in two of the most lauded television shows of the century, settling into this shrunken, disconsolate, and deeply unstarry tale. There was a period, running roughly from Clint Eastwood in “Rawhide” to George Clooney in “E.R.,” when the small screen was considered a magic portal to the big one. To claim that the situation has been reversed, and that cinema has now become a retirement home, would be going too far, but it’s noticeable, in “Maggie Moore(s),” that Hamm and Fey play people who have all but dispensed with hope, mislaying self-esteem and encouraging life to sift through their fingers like sand. One is a widower, the other a divorcée. “Losing is kind of the point,” Sanders says, as he and Rita play the slots in a casino. “No, I know,” she replies. “That’s why I fit right in.”

As you’d expect, both actors are highly adept at locating the humor in this sighing pathos. Not that the dialogue ever tightens into the snap of “30 Rock.” What Slattery conjures instead, for some reason, is a continual sourness and decay, which gets into every crevice of the action; Jay, who works at a subs franchise, saves money by buying out-of-date cheese and meat, scabrous with green mold. So heavily does the movie strain for offbeat detail—a killer who watches cartoons at full blast; Jay equipped with a neck brace and a leaf blower—that it refreshes one’s respect for Wes Anderson, whose eye for oddities remains clear and bright. By the end of “Maggie Moore(s),” I was dying for one of those instant Martinis, served by the motel machine in Asteroid City, with an orange twist. ♦

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Asteroid city.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 7 Reviews
• Kids Say 17 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Wes Anderson comedy has smart teens; also nudity, smoking.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Asteroid City is a star-studded Wes Anderson comedy that deconstructs the acting and writing process. It's about a TV show that tells the story of how a play came to the stage, while simultaneously presenting a colorful realization of that production that looks like a film. The…

Why Age 14+?

Full-frontal nudity of a fragmented female body (head out of frame). Through a w

Constant smoking, including cigarettes and a pipe. An older elementary school st

Viewers are constantly being reminded that they're watching a play, so the viole

Infrequent swearing includes "bitch" and "what the hell."

Brands are used to help set the 1955 scene and define characters: A giant bottle

Any Positive Content?

Trust and follow your curiosity.

Teen "Junior Stargazers" are celebrated for their intelligence and ability to be

Most primary characters are White. Supporting/ensemble characters are more diver

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal nudity of a fragmented female body (head out of frame). Through a window, a teen watches her mother have sex, which is depicted by showing the moment before activity occurs, with a close-up of the mom's bare feet on the bed next to a man standing above her. Kissing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Constant smoking, including cigarettes and a pipe. An older elementary school student smokes cigarettes with adults. Adults drink martinis.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Viewers are constantly being reminded that they're watching a play, so the violence clearly isn't real -- e.g., police chasing suspects with a "shoot-out" that sounds like popping sounds. Many characters carry guns in their waistbands, though it seems more to indicate the era and their characters' attitudes than to be used to hurt or threaten. Military personnel hold guns and, in one heated moment, point them at a person with a threat. Suicidal references. Father chases and smacks his son in a way that's portrayed as humorous rather than abusive. Family dealing with the loss of a parent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands are used to help set the 1955 scene and define characters: A giant bottle of Chanel is seen prominently in the bathroom of a glamorous Hollywood movie star, and a wealthy older man drives a Cadillac.

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

Teen "Junior Stargazers" are celebrated for their intelligence and ability to be comfortable in their skin, and they display wise-minded behavior about themselves and their parents.

Diverse Representations

Most primary characters are White. Supporting/ensemble characters are more diverse, including a decorated Black general, a Guatemalan attaché, and female astronomers. Minor characters include a Black cowboy and a Native American soldier. Religious diversity: A school teacher leads children in prayer, and there's frequent mention of one family being Episcopalian, while others declare atheist beliefs (and several of the actors are Jewish). Gay men shown in respected, creative roles.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Asteroid City is a star-studded Wes Anderson comedy that deconstructs the acting and writing process. It's about a TV show that tells the story of how a play came to the stage, while simultaneously presenting a colorful realization of that production that looks like a film. The layered storytelling isn't too confusing because Anderson keeps character identities and time periods clear. Because viewers are reminded frequently that they're watching a play, iffy content has less impact, as we know it's not "real." What is likely to drop a jaw or two is a moment of full-frontal female nudity (the body is fragmented, with the head out of the frame) and a reference with a confirming image to the fact that a young voyeur watches her mother having sex. One plot line involves a family coping with the death of a parent, and many characters carry guns in their waistbands, though it seems mostly to indicate the era and their characters' attitudes (though one is pointed at someone in a heated moment). There are some suicidal references. It's set in the 1950s, so it's not especially surprising that everyone smokes, including a 10-year-old. Adults sip martinis and drink beer. Swearing isn't frequent but includes "bitch" and "what the hell." The movie's teen characters are celebrated for their intelligence, innovation, and curiosity. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (7)
• Kids say (17)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Not for children

What's the story.

Junior Stargazers and their parents travel to ASTEROID CITY in the 1950s to receive awards in scientific achievement. When an alien encounter leads to a military-enforced quarantine, a variety of families find community -- and themselves -- in their unexpected week-long stay in the desert. The cast includes Bryan Cranston , Jason Schwartzman , Scarlett Johansson , Tom Hanks , Margot Robbie, Jeffrey Wright , Tilda Swinton , Steve Park, Liev Schreiber , Maya Hawke , Adrien Brody , Matt Dillon , Willem Dafoe , Hope Davis , Rupert Friend , Hong Chau, and Edward Norton .

Is It Any Good?

All of writer-director Wes Anderson 's hallmarks are present and accounted for as he takes viewers on a journey of creativity that's unexpected and unusual. But "unique" doesn't always translate to "entertaining." In the case of Asteroid City, your brain may be trying to understand and interpret what's happening so quickly that it could be hard to assess whether it was actually good -- for some, a second viewing may be required.

Teens have frequently sparked to Anderson's movies, perhaps because tweens and teens are frequently the most level-headed characters in his films. Here, there's a whole set of young "brainiacs" who are wise and confident beyond their years, including possessing a high emotional intelligence. But to truly appreciate this endeavor, you need to have an understanding of the 1950s and what was going on then in America at large, as well as in the theater and on screen. Ultimately, it's likely that only teens who identify as students of STEM, drama kids, film nerds, or Wes Fandersons will find Asteroid City out of this world.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what was happening in the United States in the 1950s and how the characters, situations, and behaviors shown in Asteroid City reflect that.

What are the trademarks of a Wes Anderson film, and how are they in evidence in Asteroid City ? Do you have a "signature style"?

Many of the characters, the TV show, and the play are a tip of the hat to existing people and properties from the mid-20th century. Whom or what do you recognize?

How are smoking and drinking portrayed? Are they glamorized? Are there realistic consequences ?

Anderson says, "You're watching an actress play an actress play an actress." How does he manage to keep the characters and the stories straight for viewers? Did you find any of it confusing?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 16, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : August 15, 2023
• Cast : Jason Schwartzman , Scarlett Johansson , Tom Hanks
• Director : Wes Anderson
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , High School , Space and Aliens
• Character Strengths : Curiosity
• Run time : 104 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material
• Last updated : January 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Moonrise Kingdom

The Mysterious Benedict Society

The Royal Tenenbaums

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The Misfits

East of Eden

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Asteroid City film review — Wes Anderson’s mid-life story brims with bittersweet truths

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Asteroid City Review

23 Jun 2023

Asteroid City

Yes, Wes Anderson has — as the jibe goes — made his film again. For some, that’s seen as a negative: that somehow the whimsical Texan auteur is simply a one-trick pony. Certainly, few filmmakers have visual hallmarks so culturally ingrained that they could spark a TikTok trend. But  Asteroid City , his 11th feature, proves that making your film again is no bad thing when said film is always beautifully, painstakingly, lovingly crafted to within an inch of its life. (You’d never criticise Picasso for making yet  another  cube-y painting.) It also demonstrates that Anderson still has the capacity to surprise.

Perhaps most surprising is that it’s never entirely clear what is real, and what isn’t. As with  The Royal Tenenbaums  or  The Grand Budapest Hotel ,  Asteroid City  has a meta framing device, an in-universe piece of fiction driving the action: a 1950s black-and-white television broadcast of “a new play created for the American stage” presented by Bryan Cranston ’s Rod Serling-esque ‘Host’. The main story we are watching — of a sleepy 1950s desert town which plays host to a meteorite crater, and later alien life — is told in parallel with a behind-the-scenes theatrical drama about that desert town. Admittedly this can be, at least until the bow-tie ending, a little more confounding than compelling, but that’s only because the primary story is, to its core, Vintage Wes.

Anderson’s fondest, most familiar themes return here: family, fatherhood, grief, love.

From minute one, the retro setting proves ripe for his artistic sensibilities, all sunblushed, saturated hues, sharp costuming, and handsome, hyperreal production design (the town looks like a kind of papier-mâché Monument Valley). He remains cinema’s most astonishing stylist, the rigour and detail in every frame never better. Wherever you care to look, his visual wit is all there, too, from the “Intermission (optional)” title card that pops up halfway through, to the highway-to-nowhere built due to “route calculation error”. Even Anderson’s camera moves are funny. (Look out for one very droll extraterrestrial cameo swoop past the lens.)

But if you let him in, the director still wants you to care for these people, to find some attachment in his detached approach. Anderson’s fondest, most familiar themes return here: family, fatherhood, grief, love. In yet another stacked, starry cast, the focus is mainly on Jason Schwartzman ’s Augie Steenbeck; his Max-from- Rushmore -esque son, Woodrow ( Eighth Grade ’s Gabe); Augie’s father-in-law Stanley (Anderson newcomer Tom Hanks ); and movie star Midge Campbell ( Scarlett Johansson ), all dealing with heartbreak in their own ways. When Stanley says, “I never really loved you,” to his son-in-law, there’s real pathos there, even if the performance is carefully hemmed in by Andersonian restraint.

As with his last effort, the brilliant-but-exhausting  The French Dispatch ,  Asteroid City  still might prove too much for Ander-sceptics. It is occasionally a bit unfocused, and always a bit indulgent. If you don’t like The Wes Anderson Film, you won’t like this. But we others must hope he keeps making it.

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