The Grand Budapest Hotel
Fox Searchlight Pictures | Release Date: March 7, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
88
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 48 Critic Reviews
Positive:
45
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
HitfixDrew McWeenyApr 18, 2014
It is safe to say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of those breakthrough moments, a movie that is so beautifully realized from start to finish that I almost doubted myself on the way home. Could I really have enjoyed that film that much? Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallMar 27, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel is as artistically manicured as any of his seven previous movies, and richer comically and emotionally than most. Read full review
100
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottMar 21, 2014
There are moments of depth there as well, as Anderson touches on themes of friendship and loyalty. More than anything else, though, The Grand Budapest Hotel is just a fun ride -- a wild, wonderful ride seemingly plucked out of Anderson's dream journal. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsMar 20, 2014
After feeding on this sweet buffet, sated cinephiles will want to call the front desk to extend their stay. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaMar 14, 2014
Sustaining illusion with marvelous grace is, in a nutshell, exactly what Anderson is all about. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesBruce IngramMar 13, 2014
It’s quintessential Anderson... but also an unabashed entertainment. And that’s something to see. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMar 13, 2014
That perception of Fiennes and Gustave is central to the whole enterprise. Without it, the movie just breaks off and flies away. But with it, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes something wonderful. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesMar 12, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyMar 7, 2014
Anderson the illusion-maker is more than graceful, he's dazzling, and with this movie he's created an art-refuge that consoles and commiserates. It's an illusion, but it's not a lie. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranMar 6, 2014
The writer-director's familiar style blends with a group of unexpected factors to create a magnificently cockeyed entertainment. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 6, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mr. Anderson’s eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it’s just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfMar 4, 2014
The auteur’s style — dramatic zooms, winking symmetry — is balanced against a newfound political context; this one’s his "To Be or Not to Be." Read full review
100
The TelegraphTim RobeyFeb 6, 2014
It’s wonderful. Read full review
100
VarietyJustin ChangFeb 6, 2014
A captivating 1930s-set caper whose innumerable surface pleasures might just seduce you into overlooking its sly intelligence and depth of feeling. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianMarc MohanMar 13, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel shows Anderson engaging with the world outside his meticulously composed frames like never before. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanMar 5, 2014
A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnFeb 6, 2014
While it has many familiar ingredients — from the atmosphere to the ensemble of Anderson regulars in nearly every role — in its allegiance to Anderson's vision, everything about The Grand Budapest Hotel is a welcome dose of originality. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMar 14, 2014
It's a terrific movie. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirMar 6, 2014
This is one of Anderson’s funniest and most fanciful movies, but perversely enough it may also be his most serious, most tragic and most shadowed by history, with the frothy Ernst Lubitsch-style comedy shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternMar 6, 2014
Real life is not the movie's concern. Mr. Anderson's lovely confection — that's a pastry metaphor — keeps us smiling, and sometimes laughing out loud. Yet acid lurks in the cake's lowest layers. Read full review
90
The DissolveScott TobiasMar 4, 2014
There’s nothing lost in his continued refinement of style; if anything, it makes the pleasures of his work that much more acute. Read full review
90
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonMar 4, 2014
Grand Budapest is Anderson's most mature film, and his most visually witty, too. It's playful without being self-congratulatory, and somehow lush without being cloying. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinFeb 27, 2014
Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyFeb 6, 2014
Constant lateral tracks, push-ins, whip-pans, camera moves timed to dialogue, title cards, chapter headings, miniatures, use of stop-action, fetishization of clothing and props, absurdist predicaments — all the techniques Anderson has honed over the years — are used to pinpoint effect here. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyMar 13, 2014
From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrMar 13, 2014
What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMar 13, 2014
One of Anderson's cleverest and most gorgeous movies, dipping just enough of a toe in the real world — and in the melancholy works of its acknowledged inspiration, the late Austrian writer Stefan Zweig — to prevent the whole thing from floating off into the ether of minor whimsy. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia PuigMar 7, 2014
It's a mature, intricately layered visual delight. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversMar 6, 2014
His (Anderson) abiding love for a vanished past, real and imagined, is at the core of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The thrill comes in watching as this rare talent gives his movie wings. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineJesse CataldoFeb 28, 2014
As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters. Read full review
88
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreFeb 26, 2014
We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details. Read full review
83
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanMar 20, 2014
Anderson leavens the lunacy with a few acts of sudden and extreme violence or avert-your-face sex, which seem as extravagant as the rest of his notions. Perhaps they’re in there to change the flavor of the humor, the way Mendl might put a bitter coffee bean in a chocolate torte to keep it from cloying us. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMar 7, 2014
Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Mar 5, 2014
Anderson’s latest invention, The Grand Budapest Hotel, may be his most meticulously realized, beginning with the towering, fictional building for which it’s named. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJessica KiangFeb 6, 2014
As off-kilter affecting as we found its nostalgia for a world of charm and dash that really only ever existed in the movies, and as terrific as almost all of the performances are, as a whole package it fell just slightly short of the promise of its parts. Read full review
82
Film.comKate ErblandMar 6, 2014
Anderson has abandoned a bit of his whimsical nature for the later portions of the film, but the film’s first half hour presents one of his most darling settings yet, until, of course, it all crumbles into murder, mayhem and bad renovations. Read full review
80
CineVueBen NicholsonJun 23, 2014
Despite being one of his most ostentatious films to date, the setting, plot, performances and authorial tone on display marry together seamlessly to simultaneously heighten and smooth his trademark style. Read full review
80
EmpireDamon WiseMar 3, 2014
Another meticulously stylish and deadpan Wes Anderson movie that walks the fine line between masterpiece and folly. Read full review
80
Total FilmEmma MorganFeb 18, 2014
Wes Anderson’s eighth feature has a heft beneath its icing, heart behind its artifice. Check in, and you won’t want to leave. Read full review
80
The GuardianAndrew PulverFeb 6, 2014
With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive, attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration. Read full review
80
Time Out LondonDave CalhounFeb 6, 2014
Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayMar 13, 2014
A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMar 12, 2014
It's not as endearing as "Moonrise Kingdom" but not as tedious as "The Darjeeling Limited." It offers an engaging 90+ minutes of unconventional, comedy-tinged adventure that references numerous classic movies while developing a style and narrative approach all its own. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedMar 5, 2014
For sure, it’s another example of style over substance — a richly deserved accusation that is always leveled at this kindergarten cop of a director, but I confess it’s a lot of scattered and disjointed fun. Read full review
70
SlateDana StevensMar 4, 2014
As played with a melancholy rakishness by the handsomer-than-ever Fiennes, M. Gustave is one of Anderson’s more memorable creations—but he’s stranded in a movie that, for all its gorgeous frills and furbelows... never seemed to me to be quite sure what it was about. Read full review
60
The New YorkerDavid DenbyMar 6, 2014
The Grand Budapest Hotel is no more than mildly funny. It produces murmuring titters rather than laughter -- the sound of viewers affirming their own acumen in so reliably getting the joke. [10 March 2014, p.78]
60
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierMar 6, 2014
The result is a film almost too reliant on its players to push it through. Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithMar 4, 2014
“GBH” is a featherweight screwball comedy that, trying mightily to be cosmopolitan, feels awfully provincial, desperately touristy. Read full review
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