Tonight's Cinema Plans? A No-Brainer: Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

March isn’t generally a good time for cinemagoers. Post Oscars, you’ll rarely find yourself torn between films when making your ticket buying decisions, and tonight is no different, with 300: Rise of an Empire, Bullet and The Grand Budapest Hotel vying for your attention. The decision is an easy one: it’s Wes Anderson every time.

M. Gustave's relationship with his lobby boy Zero is funny and endearing

The ‘alternative Hollywood’ director is back to his best with Grand Budapest Hotel, which sees Ralph Feinnes play the finicky, charming and astute M. Gustave whose life gets muddled when one of his many sexual conquests leaves him a painting, opening up a world of jealousy, backstabbing and hijinks – all of this amidst the backdrop of war.

“It's a filigreed toy box of a movie, so delicious-looking you may want to lick the screen. It is also, in the Anderson manner, shot through with humor, heartbreak and a bruised romantic's view of the past,” writes Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.

“Anderson works so assiduously to create obsessively detailed on-screen worlds that the effect has sometimes been hermetic, even stifling. "The Grand Budapest," however, is anything but,” says The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan.

Gustave and Zero - a featurette

Mara Reinstein of Us Weekly praised Grand Budapest as one of the best in Anderson’s collection. “Director Wes Anderson's films are so artistically exquisite that they should be framed and mounted. And this effort may be his most astounding,” she wrote.

And finally, it’s “Gorgeous, whimsical and wonderfully imaginative,” according to Isaac Feldberg. “The Grand Budapest Hotel is a dazzling piece of eye candy with a deceptively emotional center - in other words, it's Anderson's most ambitious and impressive film to date.”

300: Rise of an Empire and Bullet - starring Danny Terjo – might be a bit of fun, but they’re generally considered ‘a bit rubbish’. So if you’re up for sitting in a packed cinema – Anderson’s movies command quite the cult following – then you’re in for a treat with The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Meet the huge cast below: