This week’s movie releases

Wes Anderson consolidates the return to form he enjoyed with Moonrise Kingdom with critically acclaimed The Grand Budapest Hotel, a caper set in an imaginary interwar Middle Europe featuring all the meticulous mise-en-scène, rectilinear shots and oddball tragi-comedy you’d expect from the director. The star-studded ensemble cast features Anderson regulars such as Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and Adrien Brody rubbing shoulders with some big-name new recruits: F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Saoirse Ronan, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. But the film belongs to Ralph Fiennes, who gets a chance to exercise his rarely employed comic gifts as Gustave, the legendary concierge of the titular hotel who, along with his faithful lobby boy Zero, gets embroiled in a murderous plot involving a valuable painting as war looms on the horizon.

Having already repeated the success they had with 2011's Unknown by taking the number one spot at the US box office, Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra and actor Liam Neeson touch down with Non-Stop. Set on a transatlantic flight from New York to London, the action thriller stars Neeson as an air marshal who starts receiving text messages ordering him to tell the government to transfer $150 million into a designated account. Until the demands are met, a passenger will be killed every 20 minutes. Julianne Moore also features.

Twenty years after his Interview with a Vampire, Neil Jordan returns to the world of blood suckers with Byzantium. Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan star as a 200-year-old mother-daughter vampire duo dealing with the trials and tribulations of their eternal existence in a rickety seaside town. With Sam Riley and Jonny Lee Miller.

French filmmaker Claire Denis returns with the starkly named Bastards, a modern-day film noir inspired by recent sex scandals involving powerful figures. Vincent Lindo, who featured in Denis’s 2002 movie Vendredi soir, stars as Marco, a merchant seaman who returns home to seek revenge on the financier he deems responsible for his brother-in-law’s suicide and the plight of his sister and teenage niece.

Plains speaking

Denis’s fellow countryman Arnaud Desplechin examines the real-life relationship between a traumatized Native American WWII veteran (Benicio Del Toro) and a French anthropologist (Mathieu Amalric) in the moving Jimmy P.. The odd couple strike up an unlikely friendship during psychotherapy sessions in which they explore the misdiagnosed schizophrenic’s memories and dreams.