Moonrise Kingdom

In Wes Anderson’s new movie, co-written with Roman Coppola, a 1960s New England town suffers mild upheaval when a sensitive Boy Scout (Jared Gilman) runs away with the girl he loves (Kara Hayward). Anderson still knows better than anybody how to survey the cusp of adolescence with all the existential angst of a midlife crisis, and, for relief’s sake, to salt his findings with droll irony. He revels in bric-a-brac production design, eloquent riffs on stagings from his earlier films, and a tendency to arrange his stars—Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis—in handsome tableaux. But there’s also a welcome new allowance of naturalness, particularly in landscape and weather. The filmmaker’s typically tasteful musical affinities lean here toward English composers especially; sometimes it seems like he could’ve just done a video for the entirety of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Which of course would be fantastic.