★★★★

While Wes Anderson’s recent rebuttal of a TikTok trend for style homage smacked of good will deficiency, the opening scenes of Asteroid City belie a wicked flair for the self aware. This is all very typical, Russian Doll material from the cinema’s most textbook auteur. An obdurately rectilinear repository for the whimsical, sometimes irksome and unfailingly meticulous. There’s no more emotion here than pretence. Asteroid City, we are told from the off, does not exist: ‘it is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast’. Many a true word is said in jest and right back and smack a few.