Wes Anderson’s Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

A desert convention hosts young astronomers, their families and an extraterrestrial. Except: they are fictional characters in a drama written by a famous playwright. Except: the playwright, his director and their whole theatrical ensemble are themselves characters in a televised re-enactment. A movie that’s a play inside a show: Witness utmost Meta Wes, a ‘50s fantasia that collides small-town B-movie paranoia with midcentury Broadway melodrama. It’s a technical feat, because his films always are. But all the strenuous reality-warping, whiplashing funny-sad tones and theme-y spotlight soliloquies leave the actors struggling for nanoseconds of narrative air. Performances become poses. The clothes wear the people. Acolytes call this a soaring statement about the making and meaning of art. But there’s something genuinely depressing in how Asteroid takes the raw, vital Broadway of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan into the arch, artificial style of the Max Fischer players.

I won’t pretend The Royal Tenenbaums isn’t high on this list, so I won’t pretend I’ve forgiven the massive letdown of this big-budget Tenenbaums follow-up, which was the first time an Anderson movie disappointed anyone. Bill Murray plays an undersea documentarian who seems nothing like a globe-trotting explorer-scientist but a lot like Bill Murray in a funny hat. His mission of vengeance requires being a jerk on his private island and on his awesome boat. There are pirates, stop-motion creatures, co-star Seu Jorge singing Ziggy Stardust: Splendid tchotchkes! But it’s all self-awed, notably high on its own supply in its depiction of a troublesome (yet lovable) filmmaker and his adoring crew. Only Owen Wilson leaves an impression as the young man who might be Steve’s son. This was the first Anderson script Wilson didn’t co-write, but his laconic presence still brings humanity to the Mediterranean antics.

You’re a wunderkind director who just made your first flop. You’re working on your second one. Time to fill your bespoke jacket pockets with advertising dollars. Credit Anderson for over-delivering on a sellout gig. He plays himself in this two-minute spot, which choreographs a virtuoso tracking shot across a movie set. I would guess, with limited proof and heavy conviction, that more people saw this commercial than anything Anderson did between 2001 and 2012. It helped mint his own brand as a recognizable director with a distinctive style. But it also froze his public image in troubling ways: The ascot, the palatial estate, the sense his vast artistry was already shticky enough to sell credit cards.

Twenty years post-Aquatic, another lonely genius on a dangerous odyssey reconnects with his long-lost maybe-child. Benicio Del Toro plays stateless millionaire Zsa-Zsa Korda, crashing planes and fending off daily assassinations as he finalizes a plot to build up (and plunder) the oft-imperialized country of Phoenicia. Oh yeah, we’re in Wes Anderson’s Middle East. There’s a new sense of propulsive menace in this thriller, epitomized by Desplat’s thrumping-cello score, Del Toro’s sonic-boom swagger and the choice to begin the movie with someone getting blown to bloody bits.

Anderson has a penchant for distant egomaniac fathers. He is also a child of divorce who (sweetly or unbelievably) likes portraying those distant patriarchs’ redemptions. So Zsa-Zsa’s zesty espionage shades into an unconvincing moral reckoning. There are frequent glimpses into an afterlife where Bill Murray is God, plus a sudden-onset epiphany that slavery might be bad. Zsa-Zsa’s pious daughter counterbalances his inhuman capitalism, but newcomer Mia Threapleton can’t match Del Toro’s firepower. Scarlett Johansson tries another one of her accents. Benedict Cumberbatch wears another bad beard. Much as I like Michael Cera’s dual-ish role, I just don’t think any Wes Anderson character should ever actually call themselves a “bohemian.”

How to properly define this Roald Dahl compilation? Netflix initially released the four parts in separate daily episodes. After the longest segment won the Academy Award for best live-action short film, Netflix re-released them as a 90-minute single entity. They’re linked by interstitials featuring Ralph Fiennes as Dahl, equivalent to the framing device Anderson had just used for his proper anthology film The French Dispatch. Do I think Henry Sugar is a single project briefly split asunder for some craven FYC category fraud? Do I think almost no one would’ve bought a ticket to watch this in theaters? Do I think Sugar’s overt staginess and relentless monologuing is annoying? Yes, yes, yes. But Poison, The Rat Catcher and The Swan are fine, good and unbelievably great, respectively. Put this Peak Streaming curiosity down here in the “gaudy mess” phase of the list.

“Too meta” is a boring Anderson complaint. Spicier takedowns peg him as a colonial-curious patrician, less retro than regressive, so coastal elite he made himself Eurotrash. Any hater with an axe found something to grind into this railway bummerfarce about three New York brothers on a long trip across India. They are (literal) bros and (literal) white saviors who even rescue nameless locals to further their emotional journey. Jason Schwartzman, in a script co-written by Jason Schwartzman, plays a cool writer with cool woman problems who sensitively bangs a stewardess. It’s the Offensive One, and I did hate it my whole adult life. But time has warmed Darjeeling’s charms. Owen Wilson’s bruised role is quite moving given his own suicide attempt after filming. Adrien Brody makes an ideal everyman. Schwartzman really is sorta cool, damn it. The last Anderson film set in the present meanders through real locations, while his faster-paced later work retreats to vast historical soundstages. Was he exoticizing India? Must admit, trapped in my own idiotic nostalgia, I wonder if the world was better when dim white American dudes without social media accounts merely aspired to smoke cigarettes in far-off places with foreign women.

A cat-loving Japanese mayor banishes every dog in his city to Trash Island. The dystopian ultra-junkyard has rusty viaducts, rivers sparkly with oil, an abandoned amusement park, a demolished power plant and wreckage from an earthquake and a tsunami and a volcanic eruption. Isle of Dogs is a quest narrative, following one crash-landed orphan boy and five alpha canines on a rescue mission. It’s also a stunning portrait of urban waste, a bleak and beautiful spiritual sequel to all the director’s spotless yesteryears. The jagged edges and hard-PG-13 gore are worlds away from the autumnal glaze of Anderson’s other cartoon. It’s either his most topical movie (Pandemic paranoia! Militarist demagoguery!) or his most outright strange (cannibal dogs, a graphic kidney transplant, Scarlett Johansson as a manic pixie dream bitch). Dogs sparked outrage over cultural appropriation. The dogs have famous American voices; a couple humans suggest Yellow Peril stereotypes; Greta Gerwig plays the Ohioan who keeps telling Japanese people they’re wrong. Your mileage may vary. I think Isle of Dogs is a gobsmacking visual treat, and a postmodern fairy tale appropriate for heaviest-of-metal kids.

In the 2020s, Anderson’s plots have trended episodic. Does the sheer exertion of his ever-more-detailed production design sap his energy left for proper storytelling? Or is he getting carried away by the atmosphere of own coffeetable luxuriance? Dispatch is an unabashed neverland travelogue, presented as the final issue of an expat magazine published in Ennui-sur-Blasé, France. Segments veer from avant-garde art and youth in revolt to a merry cop thriller. Timothée Chalamet is somehow ridiculous and revolutionary as a French New Wave Ché Guevara, while Jeffrey Wright is quietly astonishing as a James Baldwin-esque writer. (Wright’s the best recent addition to the repertory; I’ll put money that he’ll be the leading man in Anderson’s next movie.) The conceit — What if The New Yorker came from Paris? — risks intellectual self-parody. But think of this as Anderson’s Kill Bill, a cinematic sandbox of the filmmaker’s private fixations (complete with a cartoon interlude!).

In my circle of frustrated old movie dads, conventional wisdom declares Owen Wilson the critical missing piece from Anderson’s last couple decades. The co-writers were close friends, and the actor’s genial humor deftly counterbalanced the director’s aesthetic exuberance. They co-wrote this caper comedy, starring Wilson as Anderson’s first archetypal ludicrous dreamer. Dignan writes convoluted 50-year plans but can barely down a job. Alongside his sensitive best friend, Anthony (Luke Wilson), he plots an idiotic bookstore heist. When they go on the run to a motel, a maid named Inez (Lumi Cavazos) catches Anthony’s eye. That little roadside lodge is the first complete Anderson location, with colorful walls and a glowing swimming pool backgrounding an instant romance. The script is hysterical, packed with wry-stupid banter (“They’ll never catch me, man, ‘cause I’m fucking innocent!”) and memorable characters, not least James Caan as an alleged criminal mastermind who anticipates all Anderson’s majestic-goofball father figures right up to Zsa-Zsa Korda. As modest as any debut, Rocket still feels fresh three decades later, breezy with youthful verve.

Mountain-high in alpine Zubrowka looms the titular resort, a veritable castle painted cake-frosting pink. In 1932, the young refugee Zero (Tony Revolori) falls under the spell of the concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). Conspiracy entangles the dynamic duo in a web of murder and art thievery. There is a prison break, a ski jump, cable cars and a continental descent into fascism. Budapest is Anderson’s biggest hit and only best picture Oscar nomination so far, with a mythic opulence belies its personal quality. Fiennes is splendor itself playing an elegant snob with haughty demeanor and sly self-awareness. Gustave wasn’t born rich. He’s just play-acting aristocratic comportment to service actual aristocrats (who seem quite tasteless). “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” someone says of Gustave, “but I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” That description matches Anderson’s own nostalgic posture. So Budapest is his magnum opus, even if the skiing looks dumb. Few epics have ever been this jaunty — bless Wes for always striving toward 90-minute runtimes! — with a frame tale that adds devastating historical weight.

Actors tend to come back to Wes Anderson. It must be fun: Nifty clothes, big sets, eccentric characterizations. But every film left on this list features at least one performer who never came back to WesWorld. Coincidentally, they’re the characters who shake things up, suggesting wilder realities beyond the fastidious dioramas. In this Darjeeling prologue, released as a free iTunes Store download, Jason Schwartzman is an American in a lush Paris hotel room. Then Natalie Portman invades. They are once-and-future lovers. She’s teasing, wounded, seductive, sad, tense, confident enough to make the first move, scared this night could be the last. Chevalier is a lark with purpose, sexier and more mysterious than the feature it’s introducing (where Portman barely has a cameo). It also has one of the director’s most meaningful needle drops, Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?”, which Schwartzman cues on his iPod right as he opens the door for Portman. If it seems precious for to soundtrack your own life — if the whole Wes Anderson mood just seems a bit too much — then you’ll appreciate how her baffled greeting (“What’s this music?”) cuts his self-conscious artiness down to size.

Is Max Fischer the ultimate Wes Anderson character? Schwartzman made his acting debut as the precocious teen, a barber’s son reinventing as a private-school poster boy. He’s both astoundingly diligent and a bit of a con man — which makes him a very good playwright, and Anderson’s self-portrait of the artist as a young man. But don’t forget about Harold Blume, a rich man half-dead with boredom, the part that reinvented Bill Murray’s career. And don’t underrate the tart sensitivity of Olivia Williams, who challenges the guys’ self-conceptions as first-grade teacher Rosemary Cross. Their triangle is complex. For motherless Max, Ms. Cross is both an inappropriate first love and a maternal replacement. Max reminds her of her dead husband, but she falls for Harold, who seems to view Max as both a reflection of his own younger self and the son he always wanted. Rushmore is an outrageous farce and a sensitive coming-of-age story with an all-time soundtrack and an edgy ick factor that maybe only a young filmmaker would ever risk. (Max’s stage productions were so immediately seminal that the MTV Movie Awards hired Anderson to film a few more.)

Either the first or second Wes Anderson comeback picture, depending on your feelings about well-dressed animals. On an island off the coast of New England, two kids in love run away. Suzy (Kara Hayward) is a book-lover who goes foresting dressed like Anna Karina. Orphan boy Sam (Jared Gilman) is the misfit in his scout troop. They’re chased by, well, everyone. Bruce Willis, another Anderson One-Timer, gives a remarkably sweet performance as the island’s police chief. He’s on the tail end of a love affair with Suzy’s no-nonsense Laura (Frances McDormand). Edward Norton is Sam’s baffled Scout Master. A young and memorable Lucas Hedges is the troop’s bullying troop leader. Moonrise was the director’s first arthouse hit after a decade of critical and financial disappointments. It remains his most thrilling adventure partly because he entrusts the heart of the film to his young actors. Their deadpan poses are uniquely meaningful, since their cusp-of-teenaged characters are playacting maturity as an escape from the world their ludicrous adults actually live in. And location shooting really does bring out the best in Anderson, who conjures a glorious summertime universe in the woods and waters of Rhode Island.

Anecdotally, this stop-motion feature provokes the most disparate reactions. Some consider it the moment Anderson left reality behind. Others call it the purest distillation of his sensibility. I lean toward the latter, possibly because I’ve watched it a few dozen times with my children. George Clooney is indeed fantastic as Mr. Fox, a barely domesticated rascal who moves his wife (Meryl Streep) and son (Schwartzman) from their safe fox hole to a tree house overlooking the farms of local psychos Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach recontextualize Roald Dahl’s merry hero into a backsliding old rake and desperate social climber, whose decision to restart his chicken-thief career brings consequences for his loved ones. The intra-marital regret and underclass revolution might go over your youngsters’ heads. But Mr. Fox’s carnival of delights works for all ages. Willem Dafoe is outlandish as the villainous Rat. Anderson mainstay Wally Wolodarsky steals the movie as Kylie the anxious opossum. The red-orange visuals soak pure Autumn. And all my rewatches haven’t resolved the ambiguity of the last scene, which somehow features a speech about the defeat of the natural world by industrial capitalism and a triumphant dance number.

Siblings Richie (Luke Wilson), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Chas (Ben Stiller) are disappointed adults, unrecovered from the lofty expectations of their child-prodigy youth. Their father, Royal (Gene Hackman), lives at a hotel until the checks start bouncing. Separated from his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), for decades, he fools his way back into the house with a big lie about cancer. Tenenbaums confirmed Anderson as a confessional pop visionary, juggling droll comedy and twisted characterization with symphonic yearning. Paltrow’s eye-shadowed poker face is the greatest of all Anderson deadpans, and this masterwork clarifies the filmmaker’s vintage-store artifice as an emotional coping mechanism. The Tenenbaums aren’t retro for fashion. They’re trapped in the past — even semi-brother Eli (Owen Wilson), a wannabe cowboy presupposing that General Custer survived.

Tenenbaums has everything the other movies have. It also has Hackman, whose fractious relationship with the director may explain how Royal became the ultimate bull in the Andersonian china shop. He’s the saddest and funniest of this filmography’s dreamers and schemers, an old man finally coming of age near the end of his life. His soulful redemption marks his family’s ascent from the ruins of a glorious yesterday to the possibility of a better tomorrow.