In Asteroid City, Wes Anderson stages an alien invasion as only Wes Anderson can

Insistently eccentric, involuted and reflexive, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City will likely only reinforce his detractors’ animus toward the filmmaker’s elaborate but undeniably insular world-building, but admirers — and I’m among them — will delight in the dizzying variations he works on signature themes and tropes. Although Asteroid City sometimes comes perilously close to the Rube Goldbergian joke constructions of Steven Spielberg’s 1941 — with setups so baroquely complex that the payoff laughs are more theoretical than actual — it never tips over into self-indulgence.