The Darjeeling Limited: Critic Reviews

This is familiar territory for Anderson after Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. But there's a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker's miniaturist instincts.

Unstintingly fussy, vain and self-regarding. But it is also a treasure: an odd, flawed, but nonetheless beautifully handmade object as apt to win affection as to provoke annoyance. You might say that it has sentimental value.

A precious, self-admiring and fatally misjudged serio-comedy.

It is a delight to look at, with its vibrant colors, iconic images and exotic setting, and the film has a meandering feel that captures the sense of trekking across India.

The Darjeeling Limited has its charms, chief of which is watching three terrific actors evince with unforced ease the rewards and resentments of brotherhood.

The preciousness of this new enterprise pollutes the human relationships until everything seems like a pose.

A companion piece to Tenenbaums more than a step in new directions, Darjeeling is a movie about people trapped in themselves and what it takes to get free...

Wilson, Brody and Schwartzman have their charms, but the script gives them little to work with. Anderson and his co-writers have come up with an ordinary road movie that is dependent on lame running jokes.

It's an affected film about disaffected people, and no cast in the world could save it.

Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.

The Darjeeling Limited works best when the level of artifice is at its highest and most overt.

A better film [than Life Aquatic], warmer, more engaging, funnier and very surrounded by India, that nation of perplexing charm.

However irregular the beat, this one has a heart.

What this movie has going for itself in spite of its cloying pleas for indulgence is a playful and interesting narrative structure that precludes much development and comes to the fore only toward the end.

Brothers and other strangers ride The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's captivating road movie that views life as a Great Train of Being.

The Darjeeling Limited is a step toward maturity for Anderson, too. His visual ideas are still overcalculated and the tone is often precious, but emotionally he seems to have expanded.

This film is indeed Limited -- in appeal, sincerity and substance.

Dripping with Wes Anderson's patented blend of whimsy and melancholy, The Darjeeling Limited is the story of three brothers traveling across India in search of themselves.

With more style than substance, the story is so thin it evaporates like a puff from a hookah.

Here, as in his two prior outings, Anderson's arch, highly artificial style gets in the way of character and emotional development, rendering pic piquant rather than profound.

At a stage in [Wes] Anderson's career when he should be moving on, he is instead circling back.

The whimsy of it all does a passable job of covering the dull stretches, and the actors, to a one (Bill Murray has a cameo, Anjelica Huston shows up) make it watchable.

The movie runs deepest when the brothers finally deal with their baggage, both real and metaphysical.

Dysfunctional families are as common on screen as off, but director Wes Anderson has a flair for making his clans seem bizarrely unique and yet recognizable too.

Anderson is still a maddeningly cool filmmaker. He's remote from his characters, which makes him remote from his movies. There's also a way in which he uses race as a novelty, suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world.