Rushmore, screening at the Rooftop Cinema tonight, is director Wes Anderson's second feature film, but most of the stylistic traits that would mark his later work—The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr Fox—are already in place: the obsessive attention to detail; the flat compositions; the marriage of whimsy, nostalgia and melancholy; the killer soundtrack (which here features the Who, Cat Stevens and John Lennon). The film features a very young Jason Schwartzman as an overachieving student who develops a crush on a primary school teacher, and Bill Murray in the first of a remarkable series of comic-dramatic performances that would peak with his roles in Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers, as a wealthy businessman who falls for her as well. R.J. Cutler's The September Issue screens later in the week and is similarly worth catching. Though the film is not quite on the level of the other great fashion documentary of last year, Valentino: The Last Emperor, never getting as close to Vogue editor Anna Wintour as Matt Tyrnauer does to Valentino Garavani, it nonetheless remains a fascinating look not only at the fashion world but at power relations: the tension between Wintour and her creative director Grace Coddington gives the film its centre, and Coddington emerges as its hero.

Review, 9 January 2010