REMEMBER cult hit Rushmore and that unctuous college boy who thought he was a young genius?

Wry American director Wes Anderson has delivered a baleful companion for his quirky masterpiece, and this time the Tenenbaums really are a family of geniuses, even more dysfunctional, and drawn from New York high society's troubled, spoiled seed.

Royal Tenenbaum is the errant, layabout father of the clan, a duplicitous fellow (played with caricature colour by Gene Hackman) who claims he is dying, has run aground financially and demands the right to see out his life in the house he deserted 20 years ago, when he separated from the unforgiving Etheline (Angelica Huston).

For entirely selfish reasons, Royal wants to worm his way back into the family bosom, only to discover his oddball offspring are even more troubled than he is. In the intervening years his prodigiously talented progeny have hit the heights but come off the rails.

Business brains Chas (Ben Stiller), the eldest son, has lost his wife in an accident, and his marbles and entrepreneurial flair too, bringing up his children as mini versions of his paranoid, over-protective self.

Tennis Adonis Richie (Luke Wilson) has lost the will to win, and live, after suffering a humiliating public breakdown when losing himself to love for adopted sister Margot. He has been drifting around the world in a Bjorn Borg top and headband, heading nowhere. Miserable Margot (miserable Gwyneth Paltrow), the mope with the Dusty Springfield make-up, was an award-winning playwright as a child but has lost the knack. The hits and the plaudits and the plays and the friends have dried up, but not the promiscuous affairs that are destroying her marriage to psychologist Raleigh St Clair (Bill Murray).

Narrated by Alec Baldwin, The Royal Tenenbaums unfolds in chapter headings, a suitably literary device for a caustic literary movie which takes the form of short, smart and stylish vignettes as wittily dry as The New Yorker.

Like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums is a little too in love with itself but where others have dismissed it as too clever for its own good, it is essential to look beneath that cleverness. Anderson has that rare fifth gear for an American director: irony. He would like the world to be a better place - notice how surprisingly still his New York is - instead of being the home to dysfunctional, unhappy, terminally dimmed bright lights, destined only for sadness and forlorn pursuit of love.

A true original, Anderson's mercurial movies stop Hollywood turning into Hellywood.

Updated: 09:35 Friday, March 15, 2002