The ingredients for a perfect winter afternoon include a blanket and a good movie (preferably one I've already seen, in case my son's cries interrupt my conversation). Trip to Darjeeling, of Wes Anderson, in the background. And if I can't follow it all, it doesn't matter, at least I Kinks They will be our soundtrack. And voila, what he said. Do you have time tomorrow, where will we be? Goosebumps. And the truth is, I couldn't have been clearer about it. I know exactly where we'll be tomorrow at this time: in Mendles.

A refrain circulating in some film circles: Wes Anderson is done. Audiences are tired of his films of planimetric perfection and clear-line detail. The Grand Budapest Hotel turned this filmmaker with a very personal aesthetic into a figure who was both prestigious and very popular, into a director cool for all audiences. His following films, such as the experimental The French Chronicle either the very idiosyncratic Asteroid City They revealed that Anderson is a more daring and complex filmmaker than his luscious images and star-studded casts would suggest.

It's hard to know how Wes Anderson manages to continue to function as a happy anomaly in today's Hollywood. His films remain, film after film, tremendously true to themselves and oblivious to fads and trends, building a filmography of exceptional coherence in American cinema of recent decades. An independent republic within Hollywood that is only possible thanks to Anderson's supernatural ability to summon in each film a good handful of international stars who lower their cachet to become part of the director's very personal universe. It happens again in the film that premiered this Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival,The Phoenician Plot, which stars Benicio del Toro, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, Michael Cera and, of course, Bill Murray, who has already collaborated with the director for eleven years.