“Did he just throw my cat out the window?”

By now, you probably know whether or not you like Wes Anderson movies. He has a certain style, and he is steadfast to remain within that style. So if you dislike a previous Anderson film, a new one isn’t going to change your opinion.

Anderson’s newest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is probably his lightest movie—which is ironic, because it’s also his first movie to contain multiple (violent) murders. This is also Anderson’s most fantastical movie—yes, even more so than Fantastic Mr. Fox, which featured animals talking and wearing clothes.

It seems as if, film by film, Anderson has been building up his worlds. With his previous film, Moonrise Kingdom, he created an entire island for his quirky characters to inhabit. With Grand Budapest, he creates an entire country. It is a very Wes Andersony country, indeed—the rules that apply in our everyday world don’t apply there.

Anderson goes super-meta with the framing device of this film — or I should say framing devices. The film is a story within a story within a story—it opens with a girl reading a book by an author, it goes to the author as an old man telling the story, then it goes to the author as a young man hearing the story from another source. To further these framing devices, all three each has its own unique aspect ratio.

The source of our main story is Mr. Zero Moustafa, played wonderfully by F. Murray Abraham, who I hope, with this and his brief bit in Inside Llewyn Davis, is on the verge of a comeback. Moustafa relays to the writer (played by Jude Law as a young man and Tom Wilkinson as an old man) the story of how he became the owner of the now mostly uninhabited Grand Budapest Hotel.

We meet Zero as a young man, played by Tony Revolori, as he comes under the guidance of the hotel’s concierge, M. Gustave—Ralph Fiennes, absolutely killing it. While the film is jam-packed with Anderson’s usual troupe of players, the film lives and dies with Fiennes’ hilarious performance.

M. Gustave makes a habit of wooing elderly, wealthy women—one of whom, Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, in very convincing old age makeup), turns up dead. M. Gustave is framed for the crime, and the film then becomes something of a caper story, as Zero and M. Gustave attempt to clear Gustave’s name.

Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, they’re up against Madame D.’s villainous son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) and his henchman Jopling (Willem Dafoe). Besides Fiennes, Brody and Defoe are two of the best things in the film. Brody in particular is hilarious as the vile, frequently vulgar, often pissed-off Dmitri.

In the midst of all of the madcap goings-on, we also see a slight love story between Zero and a baker named Agatha, played enchantingly by Saoirse Ronan. Ronan doesn’t have a ton to do in the film, but she has such a presence, and it’s so nice to hear her using her actual Irish accent for a change, that you end up getting transfixed by her when she’s on the screen.

Throughout the entire film, Anderson’s usual gang of actors pops up—but those viewers going into the movie hoping to see them might be a little disappointed, as they add up to little more than glorified cameos. Bill Murray’s part is sadly very small, and Owen Wilson’s part is nearly nonexistent to the point that it feels almost gratuitous that he’s in the film at all.

Anderson keeps the film moving at an almost breakneck pace, to the point that you sort of wish he’d slow down a bit so we could spend more time with these characters. Instead, he’s more interested in a madcap romp from one exotic location to the next.

This also might be Anderson’s most consistently funny film. While all of his films fall along the comedy spectrum, this seems to be the one with the most non-stop jokes and one-liners—most of them delivered (perfectly) by Fiennes.

It may not be Anderson’s best film, but it’s one of his most fun. The fact that he’s able to balance such hilarious, goofy comedy against scenes of people getting their heads cut off and stuffed into baskets shows how strong a storyteller he is.

And yet, despite all the comedy, as the film draws to a close, a certain melancholy sets in, as the storyteller telling the story to the other storyteller gets to the point of this all: that holding on to the Grand Budapest Hotel is a way of holding on to another time, another place — holding on to nostalgia. It’s almost a summation of Anderson’s career and style itself.

“Is that why you kept this place?” the writer asks Mr. Moustafa. “As a memory of his [M. Gustave’s] time?”

“I think his time had actually passed long before he arrived at it,” Mr. Moustafa says, and not just a little sadly.