‘Asteroid City’ review: Love, loss, storytelling and aliens collide in Wes Anderson’s 1955 desert dreamland
Wes Anderson’s latest mirage, “Asteroid City,” carries a lighter and literally sunnier spirit than usual for this filmmaker, whose sense of whimsy can sometimes curdle into, well, a bit of a load. Shooting in Spain, creating a drolly imagined Eisenhower-era desert town out of both practical and digital design elements, the big-sky, open-air setting of “Asteroid City” does something to Anderson’s fiercely hermetic and controlled aesthetic. Coming off the suffocating elaborations of his previous picture, “The French Dispatch,” this movie amounts to a similar risk with greater rewards.
Director Anderson and his
