Wes Anderson Films Ranked From Worst to Best

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Wes Anderson’s latest film “The French Dispatch” was invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival and the San Sebastian Film Festival. But where does it fall within the Anderson filmography? Ten films into his career, Anderson has crafted one of the most stylistically distinct oeuvres of all contemporary American auteurs: from his color palette to his framing style to his cockeyed sense of humor, you can spot an Anderson film at a hundred paces. But a unified body of work isn’t quite the same as a consistent one: for this critic, he’s had his ups and downs. Here’s how his films stack up so far — and how his signature tweeness has revealed itself over the years.

  • 9. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

    Coming off the back of “The Life Aquatic’s” wackier game-playing, this hyper-designed picaresque was supposed to be Anderson’s return to the deeper familial concerns and emotional reach of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” But nothing in its distracted, disconnected narrative of three estranged brothers attempting to mend their relationship on a derailed spiritual quest through India rang true or hit home. There’s a strange lack of self-awareness to its portrayal of privileged male self-absorption: despite the hot, beautiful hues of a geographical backdrop the film barely engages with, the final effect is chillier than it’s meant to be.

    Twee factor: 8/10. There’s some irony to its depiction of western spiritual fakery, but not quite enough.

  • 8. The French Dispatch (2021)

    A year-long, pandemic-caused delay raised expectations for Anderson’s faux-Gallic mosaic to an extent it would always be hard to live up to. Even by the director’s standards, it’s a trifle, with its separate mini-narratives — all framed as features in the eponymous American-expat newspaper — all little more than shaggy-dog jokes. For some, it adds up to an elegiac tribute to a bygone age of journalism; to others (this writer included) it adds up to not very much at all. Still, its first (and best) segment, centered on Benicio Del Toro as an eccentric, imprisoned artist, is genuinely droll, while its design elements are frou-frou to the max.

    Twee factor: 10/10. It’s set entirely in a fictional, pastel-painted town called Ennui-sur-Blasé — what more do you need to know?

  • 8. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

    Anderson’s sensibility and aesthetic are sufficiently distinctive that he doesn’t need to strain for extra quirkiness, but this slacker underwater romp piles on the eccentricities and affectations to the point of, well, soggy saturation — it needs every ounce of Bill Murray’s laconically dry onscreen energy to balance things out. It’s not without charm as a simultaneous parody of, and homage to, the work of famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, and you can’t hate any film that gives us Cate Blanchett as a plummy English journalist named Winslet, but it’s a film at once busy and aimless, packed with more whimsy than wit.

    Twee factor: 7/10. Modified slightly by its stoner potential, but come on — its sea life is designed by Henry Selick.  

  • 7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

    This will be an unpopularly low ranking for a film many regard as the director’s most lovable, but I must confess I’ve always been unmoved by Anderson’s fey 2012 Cannes opener, a 1960s-set tale of first love between two pubescent New England loners. What sounds heart-piercing on paper turns surprisingly wispy in practice: Anderson treats his young romantics more as adorable dolls than as flesh-and-blood kids: they’re named Sam and Suzy, and once you get it into your head that they were probably named after the amorous critters in Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” it’s hard to shake the thought. As gorgeously lit and shot as any Anderson film ever has been, though.

    Twee factor: 10/10. The title tells you everything.  

  • 6. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

    Both Anderson’s first animated effort and his first (and, to date, only) literary adaptation, and it wasn’t an obvious fit for him: quite aside from being a family film, the jagged, perverse humor of the late Roald Dahl, even in one of his more innocuous children’s books, exists in a very different dimension from the gentler zaniness of Wesworld. Dahl’s tone is tricky to nail — even a titan like Steven Spielberg was defeated by it — but Anderson hit on a happy, jaunty compromise here, his own obsessive-compulsive style loosened by the scrappy, tactile quality of stop-motion animation. George Clooney’s lickety-split voice work, meanwhile, was the ideal accompaniment.

    Twee factor: 6/10. It’s Wes animating woodland creatures, so still pretty damn twee, but Dahl’s voice gives it an edge.  

  • 5. Bottle Rocket (1996)

    No surprise that Anderson’s first film is his most atypical: in every frame, you can see the newcomer working toward his signature visual and tonal style, while still proving susceptible to the scruffier, less rigorous trends of the mid-1990s American indie movement. The result, a bumbling Texan heist caper, plays like early Tarantino with a more neurotic bent. It’s certainly the director’s most uneven film, but it’s more messily alive than a number of his more polished, more mannered later works — and of course, it introduced us to the scuzzy, offbeat charms of Owen Wilson. It doesn’t hold up as well as you’d hope, but you can see why Martin Scorsese, among others, was impressed.

    Twee factor: 3/10. Standard-issue 90s quirkery aside, Anderson was looking to keep it crisp here.  

  • 4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

    Anderson’s first film to reach for “major” status mostly hit the mark, thanks in large part to a performance of wry gravitas and winking sadness by Gene Hackman that we now tend to think of as the retired veteran’s screen swansong. (Let’s not bother to remember “Welcome to Mooseport.”) Anderson loves a dense, characterful ensemble — and he certainly built one here — but he rarely lets one actor set the tone as much as Hackman does in this bittersweet, Salinger-inspired dysfunctional family saga: it has a lingering, elegiac sense of melancholy to it that no amount of gleefully tacky 1970s costume design can take away.

    Twee factor: 6/10. The pastel velour surface is more precious than the heart beating beneath it all.  

  • 3. Isle of Dogs (2018)

    Anderson’s second foray into animation may well be his flat-out weirdest film to date. A dystopian every-dog-has-his-day adventure in which a band of abandoned mutts team up to subvert a corrupt Japanese dictatorship, it sounds frenetic in synopsis form, but turns out to be a cool, sparse hangout movie, the languid pace of which gives viewers more time to appreciate the delirious intricacy of its world-building, visual in-jokery and stark sonic experimentation of Alexandre Desplat’s score. The film walks a fine line between appreciating and appropriating Japanese culture that has understandably earned it some detractors, but it’s a curiously hypnotic experience.

    Twee factor: 8/10. Each last eccentric detail here is placed purely for the auteur’s own amusement.   

  • 2. Rushmore (1998)

    A quantum leap forward “Bottle Rocket,” in which that film’s manic energy found a more refined storytelling confidence, this tender coming-of-age tale gave the director his most enduring (and endearing) onscreen alter ego in Max Fischer, a bright, brashly big-thinking and socially inept high school misfit negotiating an awkward first crush on a kindly schoolteacher. Max’s own overreaching school plays speak to Anderson’s own soaring creative ambition, though it found its perfect scale in this sophomore jump. Bonus points for kick-starting Bill Murray’s career comeback, minting one of the director’s most treasured collaborations in the process.

    Twee factor: 7/10. Max himself is pretty twee, but the film recognizes that, and leans into it with love.  

  • 1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

    No, the Academy doesn’t always pick up on filmmakers at the right time, and neither does the public. But the first Wes Anderson film to get big-time Oscar love (and to top $50 million at the box office) is easily his best, a towering, crammed, exquisitely frosted celebration gateau with a big, aching heart at its centre. It represents the optimum compromise between Anderson’s restless formal clutter — it’s his most eye-poppingly designed film to date — and his more ruminative intellectual side: its skewed, imagined historical lark blossoms into a poignant essay on the ephemeral comforts of nostalgia. And as a debonair hotel concierge sensing the end of his own era, Ralph Fiennes gives the most richly layered performance in the Anderson canon.

    Twee factor: 10/10. A pastel-pink cornucopia of tweeness, this time perfectly matched to its delicate worldview.

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