Early reviews are trickling in from the Venice screening of The Darjeeling Limited, and they remain as conflicted as any I've seen so far.

Emmanuel Burdeau of Cahiers du cinéma:

To be continued then, but just this for now: a while back, a lot of people loved THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU; and there will be many I’m sure who will love THE DARJEELING LIMITED, and that seems to be a good thing, a pleasant thing, but no more.

Richard Corpliss in Time:

Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so super-cool, it's chilly. In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by with the camera point-of-view shifted 90 or 180 degrees — which is geometrically groovy, no question, but pretty quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy, but not the aptitude. His films are museum artifacts of what someone thought could be funny. They're airless. Movies under glass.

Alissa Simon in Variety:

Here, as in his two prior outings, Anderson's arch, highly artificial style gets in the way of character and emotional development, rendering pic piquant rather than profound.

But I'm keeping hope alive. The more I see and hear, the more I think it's going to be good. And I think whatever Anderson does next will (finally?) break some new-but-still-appropriately-Rushmorean ground, and there will be much rejoicing.

I'm not happy about this, though:

In Venice, pic screened with a nifty 13-minute short, "Hotel Chevalier," identified in the end credits as "Part 1 of 'The Darjeeling Limited.' " Completed in 2005, pic shows Jack and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in the titular Parisian hotel.

Short provides a potent prologue that further serves to make Jack the most sympathetic of the brothers and adds resonance to visual motifs that recur in the feature. Per Anderson, "Hotel Chevalier" will not be shown in theaters, but rather on the Internet, at festivals and on DVD.

Here's hoping this gets rethought before October.

Via Green Cine Daily, via The House Next Door.