Anthony Lane: "The World's End," "Austenland" Reviews: The New Yorker If you have watched and rewatched "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," poring over them as if they were medieval manuscripts, you will know what to expect - or, at least, to hope for - from "The World's End." The director, Edgar Wright, is unchanged. So is the lead actor, Simon Pegg, with whom Wright collaborates on the screenplays. The fidelity of the actors who continue to roll up in each film suggests that we are in the presence of a stock company - shades of Preston Sturges. The plot remains a melding of the humdrum and the deranged, nothing being madder than the devotion shown by Pegg and Wright as they spoof a cinematic genre of their choice. In "Shaun of the Dead," it was zombie flicks; in "Hot Fuzz," it was action movies, with notably loving reference to "Bad Boys II." And the object of awe and mockery in "The World's End"? Wait and see. What is new here is the location. While the first movie was set in London, and the second in the English countryside, the third lurks shiftily in between; most of it was shot in "garden cities" - towns designed in the early twentieth century to offer the best of all conditions, with commuting links to the capital plus the air of a rural repose. In practice, they have become the archetype of a British limbo, and "The World's End" duly staffs its fictional setting, Newton Haven, with lost souls. The film seethes, too, with an ill-disguised contempt for the zero style that has rendered such habitats indistinguishable; one pub is as bland and flavorless as the next, right down to the seating arrangements and the lettering of the menus on the walls. . . .