Movie reviews: The Grand Budapest Hotel

In its pomp The Grand Budapest Hotel (15A) hosted the monarchs of Europe, but Wes Anderson’s latest film opens between the wars, with the hotel stripped of much of its cachet. Nevertheless, concierge Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, playing a role reminiscent of Max Fischer in Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore) refuses to allow his standards slip. When Madame D (Tilda Swinton) dies and bequeaths Gustave a priceless painting, her paranoid son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) accuses Gustave of her murder. With its precision pans, mathematical framing, chapter plotting and penchant for men in uniforms, The Grand Budapest Hotel won’t be mistaken for anything but a Wes Anderson film, but there are changes to the template. Gone are the drawn-out endings and the deliberately quirky storytelling, and in comes sex, violence and bad language to muddy what has been up until now a chaste and clean oeuvre. By way of counterbalance, this is Anderson’s prettiest film to date, with Robert D Yeoman’s cinematography dominated by wondrous scenery and cheerful colours. While the stellar cast might look great on the poster — Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman appear in one-scene cameos, as does newcomer Tom Wilkinson. — Jude Law, F Murray Abraham, Mathieu Almaric and Saoirse Ronan enjoy slightly more screen time, but this is Fiennes’ film, and the fun he has playing against type is very infectious indeed.

Set in 480 BC, shortly after the famously glorious Spartan defeat at Thermopylae detailed in 300 (2006), 300: Rise of an Empire (16s) centres on the Battle of Salamis, a sea battle in which the outnumbered Greeks under the command of Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) took on the might of the Persian empire, commanded by Artemisia (Eva Green). Adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic novel Xerxes, and directed by Noam Murro (300 director Zack Snyder is on writing duties this time), Rise of an Empire tramples just as cheerfully on historical fact as did its predecessor, substituting epic gestures and buckets of blood for fidelity to history. The Persian Xerxes, for example, goes to war to stamp out ‘the Greek experiment in democracy’, while the Greeks nobly fight to ‘throw off the yoke of mysticism and tyranny’, while heroically ignoring their own penchant for colonising Persian territory and building empires on the back of slaves. That said, and if you can ignore the heavy-handed attempt at drawing parallels with contemporary warmongering, 300: Rise of an Empire offers vividly rendered battle scenes. Stapleton makes for a solid rather than inspiring presence as the master-strategist Themistocles, but Green is superb as a dark-eyed Fury venting her vengeful rage on the Greeks. Murro makes full use of the CGI effects to create fabulous settings but the relentless slaughter and ludicrously OTT action sequences become monotonously dull, particularly when all the sword-waving degenerates into phallic symbolism.

The Stag (15A) stars Hugh O’Conor as Fionnan, who is about to get married to Ruth (Amy Huberman). Something of a metro-sexual who is unusually — for an Irishman, at least — in touch with his feminine side, Fionnan hates the idea of a stag night. As thoughtful as she is beautiful, Ruth persuades Fionnan’s best man, Davin (Andrew Scott), to arrange a stag weekend. There’s only one snag — Davin has to invite Ruth’s brother, The Machine (Peter McDonald), an unreconstructed slab of full-blooded Irish male. Written by McDonald and directed by John Butler, The Stag follows a group of mismatched chaps into the Irish countryside on a camping weekend, with predictably irritating results for Fionnan, Davin and their group of liberal, sensitive friends. McDonald is in terrific form, a force of nature who comes on like an Irish Will Ferrell, complete with mid-Atlantic twang and Americanisms. Soon the group has gone native as they ingest drugs, bay at the moon and run naked through the woods at midnight, all at the behest of The Machine. On one level enjoyably silly fun, it also has a rather serious message to communicate, even as it grows increasingly improbable, as The Machine persuades the zipped-up group to open up and express their feelings.