Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a meticulously crafted jewel box of a film so precise in its construction that you half-expect it to chime like a grandfather clock when opened. A pastiche of mid-century journalism and European art cinema, this anthology plays like The New Yorker as interpreted by a caffeinated aesthete with an unlimited budget for miniatures. Every frame is a feast, every line reading a perfectly timed dart. And yet, for all its technical wizardry, one leaves wondering if this is a film to feel or simply to admire from behind glass.

The film’s greatest strength its devotion to artifice is also its most glaring limitation. Anderson has always been a director of dioramas, but here the human element often feels like just another carefully placed prop. Standout segments (particularly Benicio del Toro’s imprisoned artist and Léa Seydoux’s melancholic muse) pulse with genuine emotion, but others drown in their own cleverness. Jeffrey Wright’s brilliant James Baldwin-esque soliloquy on food and race nearly saves the final act, yet even his gravitas struggles against the film’s relentless whimsy.

Technically, the film is staggering. Robert Yeoman’s cinematography turns each story into a distinct visual essay black-and-white repression giving way to Technicolor rebellion. The production design (Adam Stockhausen outdoing himself) makes every desk, every cobblestone, every pastry look like it stepped out of a Sempé cartoon. But unlike The Grand Budapest Hotel, where the style served deeper melancholy, The French Dispatch often mistakes reference for substance.

It’s a film that will delight Anderson devotees and exasperate his detractors in equal measure. For all its verbal and visual fireworks, the most telling moment comes in a throwaway line: “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” This might be Anderson’s mantra a film so perfectly arranged that its humanity got lost in the margins.