Is “Asteroid City” Wes Anderson’s Greatest Film?

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City begins with a control room: a large window over a row of monitors and technical consoles. Through the window, we see a stage, a crew, and two cameras. We are not in a spacecraft; we are in a television studio. A figure appears in the central monitor and draws the camera closer—a stage within a monitor within a screen. The figure is a television host introducing a program that documents the production of an American play from its inception to its eventual performance. Past the monitor and the window, we face the host head-on as he takes us into the play’s first read-through.