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I love movies. But unlike most other people who love movies, I don’t love Wes Anderson movies. To me they’re a case of too much style over too little substance. I never care about the story or the characters, and I’m usually more inclined to fall asleep than chuckle at anything. And while The Grand Budapest Hotel is probably my favorite Anderson flick so far, I still don’t get what all the fuss is about. His aesthetic, slavishly predicated on symmetrical compositions and camera angles perpendicular to flat backgrounds, feels tortured to me — claustrophobic and suffocating. And the characters are always dressed up so neat and tidy, I just want to beat them with a stick until candy falls out of them. Their tight belts, neckties, and cuffed pants tend to cut off their personalities. Anyway, the world decried this latest Wes Anderson movie his best, so I went to see it against my better judgment. And truth be told, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would.

Ralph Fiennes stars as a horny but well-mannered hotel manager who takes a new lobby boy (Tony Revolori) under his wing. When one of Fiennes’ rich heiress lovers (Tilda Swinton) is murdered, he takes the lobby boy with him on an adventure to steal what she bequeathed him, a priceless painting, out from under her cutthroat family’s noses. Fiennes ends up going to prison and the lobby boy helps to get him out, but they’re followed by the most dastardly members of the old woman’s family. Adrien Brody and Willem DaFoe have the mustache-twirling honors. The third act is fun and action-packed (for a Wes Anderson movie, anyway), and at the end there’s even a dash of human emotion, God forbid. Everything is wrapped up serendipitously with a bow — as though you could expect anything else from Anderson.

I still don’t care for Anderson’s storytelling sense, where drama carries no weight that can’t be unraveled through a twist out of left-field. I mean, why bother investing in the first place? The whole thing is a joke from the start. I think we’re meant to watch the gilded paper dolls flit about on-screen, chuckle and remark about how cute it all is, and go home. Everything is…. just. so. fucking. precious. It makes me want to kill. God, I really do hate this man’s movies, don’t I?

So why do I like this one more than the others? Apart from Alexander Desplat’s score and the mercifully quick pacing, it’s all in the cast. I think Ralph Fiennes does a tremendous job here. He carries the movie, he made me give the slightest shit about what I was watching. It might be my favorite Fiennes performance. Jeff Goldblum is also put to good use as the executor of the old woman’s will. The sequence in which DaFoe stalks Goldblum through a museum is my favorite in the film — the one place where, for whatever reason, I especially enjoyed the hyper-stylization.

The star-studded cast also includes Edward Norton, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan and Jude Law, with quick cameo appearances from Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Tom Wilkinson, and Harvey Keitel.

Academy Awards: Costume Design, Hair & Makeup, Production Design, Score

Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Original Screenplay, Film Editing