Produced and directed by the hugely talented Wes Anderson and co-written with actor and regular collaborator Owen Wilson, this is the much anticipated follow-up to Rushmore, one of the quirkier American films of the late 1990s. The Royal Tenenbaums is no less quirky. It's a story about a gifted but dysfunctional New York family that is reunited when estranged patriarch Gene Hackman feigns terminal illness. An ambitiously original ensemble comedy, it is related in an episodic, storybook format with off-screen narration from Alec Baldwin. This stylised presentation suggests that the interlocking subplots involving the various Tenenbaums - Gwyneth Paltrow's foundering marriage to Bill Murray; Ben Stiller's paranoia; Luke Wilson's deepening depression - will be resolved in a detached fashion, without warmth or the audience's empathy. That is not so. As the narrative builds, the atmosphere thaws and something like poetry unfolds. Immaculately written and brilliantly performed (with Hackman, especially, on magnificent form), this extraordinary fable restores one's faith in American cinema.

Royal Tenenbaum and his wife Etheline had three children and then they separated. All three children are extraordinary --- all geniuses. Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster. Most of this was generally considered to be their father's fault. "The Royal Tenenbaums" is the story of the family's sudden, unexpected reunion one recent winter.