In Review: 'The Phoenician Scheme,' 'Karate Kid: Legends,' 'Bring Her Back'

The Phoencian Scheme
Dir. Wes Anderson
105 min.

Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) lives on the edge. An industrialist not afraid to get his hands dirty trading weapons in the easily inflamed world of mid-century Middle East and North Africa, he’s accumulated an enemies list that includes former trading partners, high-powered rivals, and even a member of his own family. When Korda survives an elaborate assassination attempt in the opening moments of The Phoenician Scheme, the new Wes Anderson film, it doesn’t come as that great of a surprise. More surprising: a brief glimpse of heaven that suggests he might be found wanting when he makes his eventual entrance through the Pearly Gates.

Heaven looks quite pearly, too; it’s shot in black-and-white, completing a trifecta of tips-of-the-hat to the Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death after the opening crash and Korda’s name, which he shares with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers’ producer Alexander Korda. Yet given that the stakes are (probably) nothing less than a man’s soul, The Phonician Scheme never feels itself like a matter of life and death. It has all the usual pleasures of an Anderson film. Del Toro, returning to the Wes Anderson ensemble after his work in The French Dispatch, steps to the fore with a winning deadpan performance. Anderson’s technical precision and ability to create immersive storybook worlds remains unparalleled (though, given that no one else is even trying to make movies like this, that word might be inapt). Yet where other recentAnderson films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Asteroid City build those storybooks around themes of loss and perseverance in the midst of bleak times, The Phoenician Scheme reveals little interest in such matters on first viewing. Its pleasures are almost entirely on the expertly appointed surface.

They remain considerable, though. Two intertwined plot devices drive the film’s action: a family reunion and a potential financial crisis. Pained by his narrow escape, Korda decides to reunite with his estranged daughter Liesel (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate with no desire to leave the convent, and prepare her to take over his affairs. (Korda keeps a gaggle of sons nearby, but they seem unsuited for the task.) Liesel reluctantly agrees to hear her father out, her arrival coinciding with that of Bjørn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist who’s signed onto the Korda team as a tutor. When Korda promotes Bjørn to assist