From the wonderful Daily Beast:

Each week, The Daily Beast scours the cultural landscape to choose three top picks. This week, Wes Anderson's magical Fantastic Mr.Fox, a provocative Man Ray retrospective, and the Newport Jazz Festival goes digital.

Director Wes Anderson's movies—Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic—have become some of the most beloved independent films of the last decade with their pops of vibrant color, eccentric casts, and genre-defining devotion to twee weirdness.

Now, Anderson has made his first Hollywood blockbuster (with stars like George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman), The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but he has not abandoned his singularly odd cinematography. In fact, for his adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl story, Anderson employs an even more distinctive technique, stop-motion animation, which gives his animal characters human qualities that are irresistible.

The critics all agree that Fox is Anderson's best film yet—New York's David Edelstein calls it "marvelous toy box of a movie," while the New York Press' Armond White writes that the film "renews one's sense of animation's possibilities."

The magic of Fox may cement 2009 as the year of stellar family films—from Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are to Pixar's Up (which came out on DVD this week and will be the holiday gift to beat), this year has truly upped the ante on children's entertainment.

Watch the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox >>