The Thousands

I was dubious about Wes Anderson’s take on Roald Dahl’s darkly gleeful caper about a cheeky fox who steals from three awful farmers. But Anderson’s mannered directorial trademarks work well with the stop-motion animation. There are funny sight gags and quotable lines aplenty, including perhaps the best thing anyone’s ever said to Jarvis Cocker in years: “That was a bad song.”

George Clooney’s not an Anderson regular, but casting him in the title role as a vulpine Danny Ocean was a work of intertextual genius. With his reckless charm, he plays well against Meryl Streep’s sardonically sexy Mrs Fox. In a subplot invented for the film, Jason Schwartzman is Fox’s misfit son Ash, who’s passive-aggressively cruel to his overachieving cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson). But their rivalry enriches rather than distracts from the plot.

Bill Murray feels under-used here as Fox’s lawyer mate Badger, but most other roles are delightful, especially Willem Dafoe’s “when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way” take on Rat. Charming, beautifully detailed, free of fatuous self-consciousness and completely in the spirit of its source material, Fantastic Mr Fox is Wes Anderson’s best movie in years.