If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson, you know the writer-director likes to work and, increasingly, he likes to work fast.
Though Anderson took four years to make his stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, in the time since finishing that project, he’s put out new films at a much steadier clip. The French Dispatch and Asteroid City are among his best movies to date, and for all the intricacy he brings to his scripts and sets, those films were released within two years of each other. Even knowing that he’s been ramping back up, nothing in Anderson’s past filmography could prepare fans for the sheer deluge of work he’s releasing this week; four new Netflix shorts from. All, like his wonderful 2009 animated film F⛄antastic Mr. Fox, are based on the works of British autho🥃r Roald Dahl.
The first (and longest) is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which was initially announced as a feature film. It ended up getting (though, at 39 minutes, it’s a long one), but at its Venice Film Festival world premiere it earned Anderson some of the most universally positive reviews of his career. Henry Sugar stars Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, as a man who learns see with his eyes closed, and uses it to cheat at cards, plus Richard Ayoade, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend, and Ben Kingsley, all of whom reappear in oꦇther shorts in the collection.
Anderson has three other Dahl adaptations hitting Netflix this week. There’s The Swan, which comes from the same short story collection as Henry Sugar, plus The Ratcatcher and Poison from Dahl’s 1953 collection Someone Like You. Ratcatcher, The Swan, and Poison are only 17 minutes each. Anderson may not be conceiving of this as a feature film — and the release model resembles 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinꦡet of Curiosities, more than a Netflix feature rollout — but at a combined 90 minutes, the collection is only 15 minutes shy of Asteroid Cit🔯y’s runtime and three minutes longer than Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar hit Netflix today, Wednesday, September 27th. One short will be added to the streaming service each day for the next three days, with The Swan𝄹 releasing the 28th, The Ratcatcher on the 29th, and Poison on the 30th.
As a big Wes Anderson fan, it feels like Christmas came early. Anderson is one the best and most distinctive living American filmmakers, and the chance to watch four new pieces of work from him (in addition to the masterful Asteroid City) is more than I could reasonably expect in any given year. Now if only the TikTokers and AI dweebs putting out parodies of his work would take this as an opportunity to learn that there’s more to his style than actors looking at the camera in s🦩ymmetrical compositions.