Screen/Society--AMI Showcase: Robert Yeoman Retrospective--"The Royal Tenenbaums"

Film Screening: "The Royal Tenenbaums" (dir. Wes Anderson, cinematography by Robert Yeoman, 2001, 110 min, USA, in English, Color, 35mm) -- "The best movie of 2001. Director Wes Anderson fulfills the promise he showed in "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore" with this ruefully hilarious, star-bright, faux-literary portrait of a highly dysfunctional family in a storybook New York -- think the Addams Family meets J.D. Salinger's Glass family, with a little John Irving thrown in for good measure. Gene Hackman is astonishingly great as the disgraced paterfamilas who, feigning a fatal disease, insists on moving back in with his about-to-remarry spouse (Anjelica Huston) and their three hugely disaffected grown children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson). Owen Wilson, who collaborated on the clever screenplay with Anderson, plays a goofy Western novelist with a drug problem. Danny Glover and Bill Murray are in it, too." Lou Lumenick, New York Post -- Made possible by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.