For my money (admittedly that’s not a lot) Wes Anderson is one of the best film-makers around. It seems a good time to talk about him, what with three Wes-related news items cropping up in the past few weeks. 

One was the release of the trailer for his upcoming flick The Grand Budapest Hotel. Immediately it’s very Wes-ish, possessing fastidious symmetry and a distinctive palette and features the usual gang – Owen Wilson, Bill Murray et al. – with the tantalising additions of Ralph Fiennes and Saoirse Ronan in leading roles. The dialogue still has that idiosyncratic rhythm that has spawned a glut of poor indie imitators.

The characteristic anamorphic widescreen is gone. However the Academy ratio that replaces it, presumably to evoke the 1930s setting, looks so tight and controlled that it seems as natural for the meticulous Anderson as it does novel. Shockingly however, there doesn’t appear to be a speck of Futura.

Interestingly it has also been announced that The Grand Budapest Hotel will open the 2014 Berlin Film Festival. This represents somewhat of a departure from the festival’s current identity as a place for film-making of a more austere persuasion. That Anderson’s latest was largely created in Saxony and Potsdam must surely have played a part in bringing this splash of comic colour to the German capital.

We’ve also recently seen the release of Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection. No need to shell out on the coffee table hardback though, head over to Seitz’s blog for some magisterial video essays. They are wonderfully enlightening about the references in Anderson’s films.

Did you ever notice how the opening scene of Rushmore is a mirror image of the classroom scene from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows? No? Seitz did.

The last bit of news is that Anderson stalwart Kumar Pallana has died aged 94. The plate-spinning vaudevillian owned The Cosmic Cup, the coffee shop where Anderson and Owen Wilson conceived some of their best stuff, and brought his charming on-screen presence to roles such as Mr Littlejeans and Pagoda.

In remembrance, I suggest you find his instructional Facebook video on how to make the Chai and realise his importance to the singular Anderson style.

Whilst on the subject of films you should watch, I can’t stress enough how much you should go and see space sci-fi thriller Gravity.The visuals are so game-changingly beautiful and spectacular that even film’s primary 3D sceptic, critic Mark Kermode, has admitted that Cuarón’s masterpiece justifies the extra dimension.