In 1965 on the remote New England island of New Penzanze, 12-year-old misfits Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop have run away together. Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) both feel alienated in their homes -- Sam is an orphan who more or less lives at the Khaki Scouts camp, while Suzy barely gets any attention in the ramshackle house where her distracted parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) oversee a triplet of overactive boys.
Their escape sets the cloistered island folk into a tizzy, as they search desperately for the pair before they ... what, exactly? It's a tiny island, so they don't really have anywhere to go. Their journey is about running away rather than going somewhere.
The latest from filmmaker Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums") is familiar to any who's watched his twee little whimsical movies -- disaffected characters speaking in deliberately flat cadences, punctuated by quaint snippets of obscure music, and highly stylized sets and costumes that make the whole thing feel like the inside of a precocious middle schooler's diorama.
"Moonrise" doesn't add anything new to the mix, so the result is a stale and turgid addition to the Anderson menagerie. After a career of making very personalized movies, this registers as an unattractive wallow in self-indulgence.
Bonus features, which are identical for Blu-ray and DVD editions, are rather modest. There's a making-of documentary, a tour of the fictional island, and a set tour hosted by Bill Murray.
Movie: 1.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars
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