The Grand Budapest Hotel (trailer and other stuff here)—sold out in the local movie house playing it on two screeens—is an enjoyable romp through the Central European country of Zubrowka, obscure even by fictional standards in the early 1930’s, as an unnamed brutal regime is taking increasing power. It’s best not to fixate on Wes Anderson’s tissue-paper plot and instead enjoy the numerous cameo roles. I have to believe that working on Anderson’s movies is fun; otherwise so many notable actors wouldn’t agree to do it!

Anderson didn’t break the budget on a lot of CGI to achieve verisimilitude—the imaginary vistas fit right into this fable about a generous spirit with impeccable standards. It’s great to see Ralph Fiennes, one of my faves, in an upbeat role for a change as the hotel’s concierge, Gustave H.  The fascist peril is real, nonetheless, and marks the certain end of the world the concierge is trying to desperately to protect.

If you need a break from late winter’s interminable gloom, this movie is a lively breath of spring. Rotten Tomatoes rating: critics and audiences agree (for once): 91%. Says critic Rene Rodriguez, “the pleasure curls your toes.”

The movie is based on the several writings by Austrian novelist, biographer, and playwright Stefan Zweig, a Jew who in real life fled his country upon the rise of Hitler—first to London, then New York, and Brazil.

Such a shame James Gandolfini’s near-last movie had to be the lifeless Enough Said (trailer). The acting is fine, but the dialog is awful. And at the crisis moment, when he asks the heroine why she did what she did, the writer drew a blank, leaving poor Julia Louis Dreyfus to just shrug. So much for motivation. As reviewer Nathan Rabin said, “Enough Said is afflicted with a terminal case of what Roger Ebert dubbed ‘The Idiot Plot,’ in which a single reasonable sentence uttered in a rational tone could easily, diplomatically resolve the film’s core conflict.” Actually painful to watch.

As is so often the case with Hollywood, what these two see in each other is another blank—they laugh a lot, or she does—and she has to be a pretty dumb cluck not to question some of the received opinions about him. Her friends—Toni Collette and Ben Falcone—are a mysterious couple, who stay together because . . . actually, I can’t figure out why. Collette, it turns out, is a therapist, but displays no insight into her friend’s relationship or why she herself keeps rearranging her furniture. Same house, same furniture, same husband.

Rotten Tomatoes rating: an unbelievable 96, which I have to believe reflected the reviewers’ respect for Gandolfini in roles other than this one. Among audience members—generally more forgiving—only 78 percent liked it.

P.S. Maybe in Hollywood, they still call a woman “masseuse,” but everywhere else it’s “massage therapist.”