The Films of Wes Anderson, Ranked

There are few filmmakers who have committed so thoroughly to the bit as Wes Anderson. Since the release of his first independent feature film, Bottle Rocket, Anderson has continually sought to one-up his very personal and ubiquitous oeuvre with a grand assortment of delightful tales of deeply flawed, but very funny protagonists. In his nearly three decades of work, in which he has released twelve feature films and a slew of shorts, Anderson’s work has ranged from the animated darling Fantastic Mr. Fox and the messy family comedy-drama The Royal Tenenbaums to Best Picture-nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel. His latest, The Phoenician Scheme, is currently playing in theatres.

For anyone who has seen even one of his movies, Anderson’s name immediately conjures up images of dollhouse sets, dry-as-bones humour and line deliveries, and perfectly symmetrical shots. Of course, there’s a lot more that makes him tick as a storyteller than just his visual flair, as a rather annoying TikTok trend from a few years ago perfectly illustrates. Anderson is a master of artifice, using frame narratives and heightened theatricality to tell often heartbreaking stories through a comedic veneer. For some, the Anderson-isms are overdone, twee, and trite at this point, with the artificiality of his worlds becoming a detractor, rather than something that can be enjoyed. For someone like me, however, the artifice lends itself to a filmography full of conversations about the guises people put on to protect themselves, the human relationship with narrative, and the breakdown of connection. It’s fascinating stuff.

With that out of the way, here are all twelve of Wes Anderson’s movies (and a collection of short films) ranked!

This article was originally published on June 24, 2023. It has been updated, revised, and republished to reflect new additions to Anderson’s filmography.

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13. Isle of Dogs (2018)

“I wish somebody spoke his language.”

Isle of Dogs is quite bleak for a children’s animated film, with its dystopian setting, grey-infused colour palette, and vision of a world that has grown bitter and cold. It pairs well with its immediate predecessor, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a tale about the malicious arm of fascism slowly removing all beauty and joy in the world, but taken to the extreme here. Set in a futuristic Japan where all of the nation’s dogs have been banished to an island of garbage, it’s up to Atari Kobayashi, a young boy and the distant relative of the tyrannical mayor, to save the dogs. Thematically, the film is quite ambitious. It’s a movie about “other-ing,” immigration, and the dangers of propaganda — heavy stuff for a kid’s movie, although both this and Fantastic Mr. Fox are far from just “movies for children.” Yet, Isle of Dogs leaves me feeling hollow inside. Between the stylistic choices and the overwhelming ensemble, it’s far to feel fully invested in the emotional reality of the story (a theme of Anderson’s later work). It’s unsubtitled Japanese dialogue means that a handful of English-speaking characters, including the dogs, are given the primary agency in the film. While the big ensembles of the live-action films work because of the performers’ abilities to bring so much life out of small moments, the more emotionally reserved stop-motion deprives that from the film. There’s also some potential cultural insensitivity here, but I’ll let people more intelligent and more experienced than I debate that one.

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12. Bottle Rocket (1996)

“You’ve never worked a day in your life. How can you be exhausted?”

Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s debut feature, is definitely his weakest film. While it’s far from a bad movie, Bottle Rocket is certainly the most minimalistic, stylistically and emotionally. For some, this pared-back version of Anderson is quite effective, where his oddball characters feel like quirks in a relatively normal world. Brothers Luke and Owen Wilson take the starring roles as a pair of friends attempting a string of heists in rural Texas, a plan that goes sideways when one of them falls in love with a motel maid. On a shoestring budget of $5 million, the film is a beautiful deconstruction of the ‘90s crime comedies inspired by the likes of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Unlike the others, Tarantino’s film is the story of two unapologetic losers. While it doesn’t have the immediate flair of his later films, there are so many familiar beats that begin to take shape here: awkward romance, life plans and thwarted life plans, brilliant colours, and a pair of incredibly strange leading comedic performances. This would be a slam-dunk for any other filmmaker, but for Anderson, this is only the rumblings of what would follow. It was a miserable failure at the box office, unfortunately, but it had enough pizzazz to capture the attention of the right people in Hollywood.

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11. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

“Help yourself to a hand grenade.”

In a filmography full of profoundly flawed protagonists, Benicio del Toro’s Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda might be the cruellest of the bunch. An arms dealer and illicit businessman with a plan to totally take over the economy of the desert nation of Phoenicia (set somewhere in the Middle East), Korda is afraid of just one thing: death. With his enemies closing in all around him, Korda tries to make amends with his novitiate daughter, Liesl (played by Mia Threapleton), in a last-ditch attempt to secure his legacy. However, if he wants her help, he’s going to have to execute his plan without the slave labour. Anderson’s latest has the immediate narrative clarity of some of his older films, although as Korda and Liesl venture across Phoenicia, the cast balloons, with appearances from a dozen or more of Anderson’s regulars all angling for a chance in the spotlight. It is certainly a contemporary political work, with Korda drawing a few inevitable comparisons to the wealthy ne’er-do-wells of the modern world, but the film here is more of a redemption story than a political satire. Exceedingly violent, although always with a veneer of general civility, The Phoenician Scheme is brilliantly funny, if not as much of an emotional roundhouse as it wants to be. Michael Cera steals the show in one of my all-time favourite performances in a Wes Anderson movie.

You can read my full review here.

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10. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

“I love the way this country smells. I’ll never forget it. It’s kind of spicy.”

Just like how Bottle Rocket takes the 1990s wave of Tarantino-inspired crime films and populates it with losers and outcasts, so does The Darjeeling Limited take the story of white, western travellers journeying to foreign lands for enlightenment and tells it from the perspective of three bickering, whiney brothers. The Whitman brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) are, like many Anderson protagonists, pretty mean-spirited people. Endlessly squabbling and struggling to overcome their differences and the death of their father, the film gives endless empathy to these men as they stumble their way through one uncomfortable fish-out-of-water scenario to the next, stuck in a country that they do not (or will not) understand. Shot primarily aboard a real train running through the Indian countryside, the film shows Anderson’s powers with limitations and how dynamic his camera can be, even on a cramped train car. The film unfortunately ends up falling into the romanticization of the East that it wants to be critical of, but it mostly succeeds in telling a rather subversive spiritual journey. While not quite as specific and sincere as its immediate predecessors, The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums, the highs here are astronomical (“What did he say?”; “He said the train is lost”; “How can a train be lost? It’s on rails.”)

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9. Rushmore (1998)

“I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”

It might be considered an act of hearsay to have Rushmore this far down on the list. I am sorry to the gods of independent film. This film, Anderson’s sophomore outing, is a massive jump-up from Bottle Rocket in both style, substance, and confidence behind the camera. Jason Schwartzman leads the charge as Max Fischer, the Renaissance man of high school students, who, despite his impressive list of extracurricular accomplishments, is on the verge of failing out of school. Soon, Max befriends the wealthy Herman Blume (played by Bill Murray in his first of many collaborations with Anderson) and forms a strange infatuation with one of his school’s elementary teachers. It’s full of incredibly awkward comedy, narcissistic characters bringing about their own melancholic existences, and a general air of precociousness. The film also features perhaps the greatest high school play of all time. I think, if anything, Rushmore is this far down my list because I have nothing of note to say about it. It’s a good movie, it’s just never been that special to me. Maybe that gives me cause to revisit it sometime soon.

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8. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

“Our daughter’s been abducted by one of these beige lunatics!”

Wes Anderson does a full-bodied romance, and it’s just as delightful as you might think. Set almost entirely on a small New England island in the 1960s, Moonrise Kingdom charts the childhood romance of Sam, a boy scout, and Suzy, a resident of the island, after the two disappear into the wilderness together. It’s an emotionally rich and resonant story about innocence, first feelings, and broken families (a theme!), told from the complicated, if not naive, perspectives of its adolescent primary characters. The title, a magical name for a relatively ordinary point on the island, given an extraordinary sense of magic and wonder by the protagonists, evokes a sense of eternal summertime of childhood. It’s silly, light, and decidedly gentle — and misses the usual tragic laziness that overcomes many of Anderson’s protagonists — all the while building towards a comedically frantic finale. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Anderson movie without its more devastating emotional state coming out to play. It’s an absolute gut-punch of a movie hidden under a veneer of eccentricity, boy scouts, and the colour yellow.

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7. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2023)

“My darling boy. What’s happened to you?”

While technically not a feature film, this collection of four short films makes up for its brevity thanks to its ambition and visual inventiveness. Each based on a story by author Roald Dahl, a writer whom Anderson previously adapted with his film Fantastic Mr. Fox, the films embrace the whimsy and delight of Dahl, serving as a love letter to the author and a wonderful addition to Anderson’s filmography. The collection takes the audience through a whirlwind of eclectic tales — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a globe-trotting tale of a card cheat; The Rat Catcher, featuring Ralph Fiennes as a disgusting rat-man; The Swan, perhaps Anderson’s most emotionally devastating work; and Poison, which confronts racism and snakes in colonial-era India — each with a permutation of the same base ensemble cast. With visual presentations that make each film feel more like a stage play than anything else, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More highlights Anderson’s talents through limitations, creating one of the most potent distillations of what makes the filmmaker so interesting.

You can read my full review here.

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6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

“Don’t point that gun at him, he’s an unpaid intern.”

Released hot off the heels of The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, an homage to French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, is one of Anderson’s less appreciated films. Although initially a box office flop and was received rather coldly by critics, it’s been able to find more love amongst newer audiences venturing into Anderson’s filmography, myself included. Bill Murray takes on the title character, Zissou, who travels around the world’s oceans with his rag-tag team of colleagues and family members, shooting hours of footage every day to find his next great documentary film while hunting for the ultra-rare shark that devoured a member of his crew. If Rushmore proved that Murray had a whole second life as an actor waiting for him in independent comedy-dramas, then The Life Aquatic sealed the deal with one of his career-best performances. Joining the fray are Owen Wilson as Zissou’s possible son, Anjelica Houston as Zissou’s embittered wife, Willem Dafoe as a German member of the crew, and Cate Blanchett as a journalist out to discover the secrets of Zissou’s personal life. It’s a film about masculinity, artistic burnout, pride, and obsession. The shot of the cut-in-half Belafonte is still Anderson’s best use of the dollhouse set, and the undersea finale might be one of his finest.

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5. The French Dispatch (2021)

“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

I will gladly admit that I like The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (or simply, The French Dispatch) more than the average viewer. This film is Anderson at his most narratively ambitious and stylistically self-indulgent. For some, this makes the film reel too disjointed and lacking in depth. For me, this is a work of true creative freedom in which one of our most singular filmmakers pushes his impulses to the maximum. I can’t help but be compelled. His first live-action film in seven years following the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the film is structured around an anthology of vignettes, each pulled from the pages of the eponymous newspaper to celebrate its final issue. The film pivots between the tragedy of an incarcerated artist and his prison guard lover, a story of young love in the midst of political revolution, and an idle food piece-turned-breakneck crime saga about the police commissioner’s kidnapped son. The postwar world of the French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé is brough to life in great, loving detail with a beautiful ensemble of performers (maybe his best use of large ensembles yet), stunning production design, and constantly shifting cinematography, which alternates through black-and-white and colour photography and an array of aspect ratios, emulating the photographic styles of its mid-century literary magazine influences, namely The New Yorker. While the film might suffer from trying to do a little bit too much of everything, Anderson manages to ground its many segments through a very beautiful conversation on the power of the written word, the commercialization of art, and the great uncertainty that comes with trying to be a professional creative, while having a great deal of fun along the way.

You can read my full review here.

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4. Asteroid City (2023)

“What’s out there? The meaning of life, maybe there is one.”

Anderson loves frame narratives. He opens his stories with book covers, magazine printers, and narrators, losing his characters in the world of playful, delightful fiction. Anderson is deeply meta-cognizant of the power of storytellers. Asteroid City is easily the most extreme example of his impulse. Set in the imaginative world of a Broadway play being presented on television, the film follows a mishmash of characters who find themselves stuck in a small town in the California-Arizona-Nevada desert after an alien spacecraft makes unexpected contact. Of course, the film is also about the theatre troupe staging the play Asteroid City for their audience, as the story weaves in and out of the two worlds, through memory and dream, as it cuts into the characters both in the play and the members of the troupe and the messy middle ground they inhabit. Asteroid City is an existential, angsty portrait of grief, loss, and searching for meaning in life. The performances from its sprawling ensemble are excellent, with Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Hanks being the stand-outs. The film embraces the extremities of his style that Anderson pushed into The French Dispatch, but keeps the narrative more emotionally grounded than in its predecessor, even if its themes are loftier. When asked what the play-within-the-film is about, the writer (played by Edward Norton) says with a pause, “Infinity, and I don’t know what else.”

It’s Sam Sheperd-meets-Steven Spielberg in the American desert. What more could you want? 

You can read my full review here.

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3. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

“Anybody interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hittin’ the cemetery?”

The Tenenbaums are the platonic ideal of a dysfunctional Wes Anderson family. A family of failed artists, businessmen, and athletes, the Tenenbaums are full of decades’ worth of resentments and animosity, most directed towards the family patriarch, Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum. Royal strolls back into his family’s life, causing a fresh wave of resentment to emerge after being kicked out of his hotel room residence with a fake terminal cancer diagnosis and a desire to make things right. Although forgiveness isn’t such an easy thing to find, and this collection of damaged characters are going to have to sort through a lot of pain in order to find space for each other again. Anderson truly found his stride with The Royal Tenenbaums, his third film and the one that catapulted him fully into the zeitgeist of contemporary filmmaking, which still features prominently among the director’s best work. Finding droll humour in a pack of strange, pathetic characters, the film manages the director’s signature love of broken people with his indelible, off-putting comedy. Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and the ever-scornful Gwyneth Paltrow make for a compelling cast of failed, unloved adult children, but it’s Hackman’s weasely Royal who steals the show here, in one of the finest performances in Anderson’s filmography and one of the best in the actor’s grand library.

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2. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

“What the cuss?”

Based on the children’s novel by Roald Dahl (his first adaptation of the author’s work), Fantastic Mr. Fox is Andderon’s first foray into the world of stop motion animation and, boy, is it a knock out of the park. George Clooney comes on board the film as the rascally Mr. Fox, a newspaper columnist and former chicken thief who has a plan to pull one last string of jobs against the crumudgeony farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. The script changes Dahl’s crafty titular hero into somewhat of a more scheming cad, who’s morally questionable choices to get onto the bad side of the farmers might just pull him, his wife (Meryl Streep), his son (Jason Schwartzman), and the rest of their animal friends into a fight they can’t win. Full of childhood whimsy and a devotion to silliness, there’s a palpable message of community reliance found amidst the cartoonish violence and delightful characters. While the film’s sense of adventure and Dahl-esque humour makes it a very rewarding children’s film, the underlying story of a mid-life crisis and a marriage on the fritz means that the emotional core of Fantastic Mr. Fox is as resonant and tender as anything else, and even more so, on this list. It’s a rather delicate and always delightful madcap, breezy family comedy. If you’ve never ventured into the Wes Anderson waters before, this is where you start.

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1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

“Keep your hands off my lobby boy!”

Nostalgia is a strong, recurrent motif in Anderson’s work. It’s no accident that none of Anderson’s live-action films since Moonrise Kingdom have been set in the present day, always finding themselves somewhere in the murky 20th century. Even his earlier, present-day-set movies have themes of lost time and trying to cling to the past. Nowhere is that seen as strongly as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the story of a charming hotel concierge, Gustave H. (played by the delightful Ralph Fiennes in a performance that delicately dances between sincernce affluence and dry self-awareness), who sees his world of classy eastern European aristocracy crumble into the cruel hands of fascism in the mid-1930s. But to get to this feeling of lost worlds and a crumbling society, one must first skate through a wealth of slapstick comedy, sharp dialogue, an inventive Hitchcock homage, and a plethora of incredible characters (including some fabulous work from Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, and Adrian Brody). The film is, in all essence, a crime mystery in which Gustave and his faithful lobby boy, Zero (played by Tony Revolori), must solve the case of a missing painting and absolve Gustave of the murder of one of his most faithful clients. The fictional European nation of Zubrowka is brought to life with immaculate costuming, production design, and cinematography, as the picturesque world of Gustave’s hotel serves as a facade over the tragedy underneath. This is Anderson’s magnum opus.