Jeffrey wright

Surely it is a sign of these hard cinematic times that an auteur-helmed remake of a midcentury international cinema classic is also the most exciting, engaging movie of the summer. Before Apple Original Films removes it from theaters for its future life on streaming, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest appears in US cinemas amid the usual summer commotion: comic-book movies and assorted remakes or sequels. As noted, Highest 2 Lowest is a remake too, but a remake of a work so remote from the cultural consciousness of most 21st-century moviegoers (Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low) that it feels fresh.

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter throughout because we won’t get tired of that. But I promise you we quickly do.