‘Asteroid City’ Review: Wes Anderson’s Latest Is Quirky, Creative & Obscure – Cannes Film Festival

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“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” people are advised more than once in Wes Anderson’s madly original 11th film, Asteroid City, which is both addictively stylized and, like this clever little quote, perhaps more than a tad obscure about what it’s ultimately driving at.

Set entirely in a sort-of Monument Valley-adjacent desert setting in 1955 and populated by a fabulous ensemble cast, this Cannes Film Festival competition entry from Focus Features, which will open commercially in the U.S.

on June 16, is a madly quirky surprise that oozes creativity at every turn. At the same time, however, it sometimes seems to be reaching for serious creative epiphanies that aren’t forthcoming and which foster puzzlement rather than insight. RELATED: Read All Of Deadline’s Reviews From The Cannes Film Festival You can always tell an Anderson film from the get-go; no American director so formally stylizes compositions and camera moves the way he and his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman do; the new film is characterized by the innumerable lateral tracking shots that have long since been one of the duo’s trademarks.

Yet this is no Western but rather, one might say, an anti-Eastern, in the anti-communist sense. It’s the height of the Cold War, when school-aged children were told to be on the lookout for spies and suspicious characters and to worry about the atom bomb.