Yes, Wes Anderson has — as the jibe goes — made his film again. For some, that’s seen as a negative: that somehow the whimsical Texan auteur is simply a one-trick pony. Certainly, few filmmakers possess’own’nurse visual hallmarks so culturally ingrained that they could spark a TikTok trend. But Asteroid City, his 11th feature, proves that making your film again is no wicked’dreadful’undesirable’adverse’vile thing when said film is always eye-catching’good-shaped’appealing’charming’fascinating’gorgeous ly, painstakingly, lovingly crafted to within an inch of its life. (You’d never criticise Picasso in/with regard to’concerning’regarding making yet another cube-y painting.) It also demonstrates that Anderson still has the capacity to surprise.###Perhaps most surprising is that it’s never entirely eliminate’remove what is real, and what isn’t. As with The Royal Tenenbaums or The Grand Budapest Hotel, Asteroid City has a meta framing device, an in-universe piece of fiction driving the action: a 1950s black-and-white television broadcast of “a new play created in/with regard to’concerning’regarding the American stage” presented by Bryan Cranston’s Rod Serling-esque ‘Host’. The main story we are watching — of a sleepy 1950s desert town which plays host to a meteorite crater, and later alien life — is told in parallel with a behind-the-scenes theatrical drama with regards to’concerning’with respect to that desert town. Admittedly this can be, at least until the bow-tie ending, a little more confounding than compelling, but that’s merely’barely because the primary story is, to its core, Vintage Wes.###Anderson’s fondest, most familiar themes return here: family, fatherhood, grief, love.###From minute one, the retro setting proves ripe in/with regard to’concerning’regarding his artistic sensibilities, all sunblushed, saturated hues, sharp costuming, and handsome, hyperreal production detoken (the town looks like a kind of papier-mâché Monument Valley). He remains cinema’s most astonishing stylist, the rigour and detail in eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully frame never better. Wherever you care to look, his visual wit is all there, too, from the “Intermission (optional)” title card that pops up halfway through, to the highway-to-nowhere built due to “route calculation error”. Even Anderson’s camera moves are funny. (Look out in/with regard to’concerning’regarding one intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully droll extraterrestrial cameo swoop past the lens.)###But if you let him in, the director still wants you to care in/with regard to’concerning’regarding these individual , to find some attachment in his detached approach. Anderson’s fondest, most familiar themes return here: family, fatherhood, grief, love. In yet another stacked, starry cast, the focus is mainly on Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck; his Max-from-Rushmore-esque son, Woodrow (Eighth Grade’s Gabe); Augie’s father-in-law Stanley (Anderson newcomer Tom Hanks); and movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), all dealing with heartbreak in their own ways. When Stanley says, “I never really loved you,” to his son-in-law, there’s real pathos there, even if the perin/with regard to’concerning’regarding mance is attentive ly hemmed in by Andersonian restraint.###As with his last exertion , the brilliant-but-exhausting The French Dispatch, Asteroid City still might prove too much in/with regard to’concerning’regarding Ander-sceptics. It is occasionally a bit unfocused, and always a bit indulgent. If you don’t like The Wes Anderson Film, you won’t like this. But we others must hope he keeps making it.