The Royal Tenenbaums

This June, The Loft Cinema celebrates the release of offbeat auteur Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic confection, Asteroid City (opening at The Loft Cinema for a regular engagement starting on Thursday, June 22), with a delicious collection of some of his greatest, funniest, most Wes Anderson-ish films, back on the big screen where they belong!  Whether you’re seeing them for the 1st or the 101st time, it’s always the right time for The Films of Wes Anderson at The Loft Cinema!

This masterful tragi-comedy from Wes Anderson essays the epic misadventures of a misanthropic patriarch and his brilliant but spectacularly dysfunctional family as they spiral into glorious chaos. Gene Hackman is both funny and devastating as Royal Tenenbaum, the head of a self-destructive family of oddball geniuses who struggle to connect with each other and the world at large. Tenenbaum and his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), had three children—Chas, Margot, and Richie—and then they separated. Chas (Ben Stiller) started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a playwright and received a Braverman Grant of $50,000 in the ninth grade. Richie (Luke Wilson) was a junior champion tennis player and won the U.S. Nationals three years in a row. Unfortunately, virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently vaporized by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster. Funny, sad and bewildering, The Royal Tenenbaums is a unique and brilliantly stylized study of melancholy and redemption. (Dir. by Wes Anderson, 2001, USA, 110 mins., Rated R)