#8. Moonrise Kingdom
dir: Wes Anderson
wr: Wes Anderson/Roman Coppola
cin: Robert D. Yeoman
Moonrise Kingdom, like many of the films on this list, came with a lot on its shoulders. In this case, it wasn't festival hype or a franchise anniversary, but merely the fact that every new film by a respected auteur is met with baited breath, apologists and schadenfreude enthusiasts. Wes Anderson is especially prone to these, I feel, because his films come prepackaged with an upfront artifice that can come off as "twee", if not a way of holding real emotions and conflicts at arm's length. It's understandable to fear that the lost-in-time aesthetic utilized so beautifully in The Royal Tenenbaums would wear thin eventually.
And yet, Moonrise Kingdom may be the best film he's ever made. This time around, the retro designs and stylized miniatures add further depth to the story of a summer romance between an orphaned boy scout (Jared Gilman) and a lonely local girl (Kara Hayward). They're in that bizarre stage of pre-adolescence where they're having these feelings and puttering around with the physical aspect, yet still maintaining a degree of innocence and naivete that leads to fish-hook earrings and packing late library books as survival supplies. Anderson wisely guides the child actors into very serious performances, never overplaying the kid aspects, but treating them as mini-adults -- which, of course, all kids think they are. They are confident even when caught.
