Every Wes Anderson Movie, Ranked

Probably Anderson’s most joke-dense and politically charged movie, Isle of Dogs is a stop-motion animated sci-fi fable about loyalty and corruption. It was a prescient comedy about quarantine, and also one of Anderson’s most emotionally detached movies. The film is a masterpiece of tiny visual details, but its weighty themes are often overwhelmed by the aesthetics, as well as a dystopian vision of a futuristic Japan that doesn’t feel fully realized. It doesn’t help that the humans speak Japanese without subtitles, while the dogs banter in English — a curious creative choice that can be alienating. Still, the cast is impressive, especially Bryan Cranston’s Chief, an exiled stray who helps a 12-year-old orphan find his beloved pet pup. Three screenwriters wrote Isle of Dogs with Anderson, which may explain why the story feels somewhat unfocused. There’s a bleakness in this sprawling movie that lacks Anderson’s usual charm, although it’s hard to argue with the core thesis that dogs are awesome, far more so than man.

This is the closest we’ll get to The New Yorker: The Movie. Anderson’s first live-action film after a seven-year hiatus finds his love letter to literary magazines crammed with creativity, but the ratio of style to substance teeters heavily toward style. The framing device — and Anderson loves a framing device — is simple: The French Dispatch is a Midwest literary magazine, and each story within the film is a feature in that magazine. The best of the bunch stars Benicio Del Toro as an artistic criminal inspired by a prison guard played by Léa Seydoux. The second-best entry in the anthology features Jeffrey Wright, in his first time working with Anderson, as a journalist sharing a tale that blends true crime with the culinary arts. The French Dispatch is one of Anderson’s most cerebral films, a manifesto about art and its relationship to life and society. And yet, there’s a touch of romanticism — Anderson roots for bohemians and revolutionaries.

Anderson’s first movie, as well as that of its two stars, Owen and Luke Wilson, who jointly possess the most doleful eyes in show business. The IRL brothers star as old friends, one of whom breaks the other out of a psychiatric ward with plans for a life of crime. It’s a comedic crime caper that gently pokes fun at gritty Nineties indies and explores themes that have informed Anderson throughout his career, including complicated misfit sibling dynamics. Anderson’s visual flair is muted here, though brewing underneath the antics: There are a few satisfying sight gags, and the movie glows with raw energy — a cult hit back then that has evolved into a portrait of the director as a young man.

Benicio Del Toro is a quasi-Trumpian industrialist whose rivals are trying to kill him; the man can’t fly in a plane without someone trying to blow him out of the sky. This movie trods familiar Andersonian ground: daddy issues, loyal assistants, and theatrical special effects drive its story of ambition and redemption. But there are just enough surprises to distract from the same old, same old. Del Toro is a light-footed brute torn between Ayn Randian greatness and a yearning to bond with his estranged daughter, a pipe-smoking aspiring nun played by an excellent Mia Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter!). Somehow, this is also Michael Cera’s first appearance in a Wes Anderson film, and these two geeks were meant for each other. He’s brilliant as Bjorn Lund, an awkward Norwegian entomologist who gets drunk on three beers.

One of Anderson’s most controversial movies — a road trip on a train through India with a distinctly colonialist vibe that is still off-putting. The entire subcontinent and its denizens are important characters, but neither the country nor its people are explored with any real depth. That aside, the three main performances are some of the best acting in all of Anderson’s films. The plot: Three brothers — played by Luke Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman — grieve the death of their father on a train trip to find their mother, who didn’t show up to the funeral. Wilson’s sensitivity is on display, his face covered in bandages, as is Brody’s fragility (there are few actors as good at conveying what it feels like to be uncomfortable in one’s skin). And Schwartzman’s performance, as always, contains multitudes. The Darjeeling Limited also showcases Anderson’s excellent taste in music, a mix of Bollywood bangers and the Kinks. Anderson loves trains — they make appearances in several of his movies. But one gets the feeling that the Darjeeling Limited is the locomotive he loves the most.

Imagine if Close Encounters of the Third Kind were combined with the work of Chuck Jones and Arthur Miller. Throw in a widower who can’t bring himself to tell his kids their mother has died, and a small army of desert eccentrics, plus a stop-action alien, and you have one of Anderson’s most heartfelt films. It’s also a movie with a clear message: Grief makes us human, and there’s no avoiding it. The widower is played with awkward grace by Jason Schwartzman, the veteran member of the Wes Anderson Repertory Players most attuned to his director’s emotional vibrations. Asteroid City is a story-within-a-story that takes place in an imaginary mid-century American Southwest and an old-fashioned TV studio. One of Anderson’s most colorful and eye-popping movies — the pastels are mesmerizing — it’s simultaneously intergalactic and earthbound. The usual players are, as usual, excellent: Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Jeffrey Wright. New additions to Anderson’s rotating cast include Tom Hanks and Steve Carell as an offbeat motel manager. And Scarlett Johansson exploits a vulnerability she rarely gets to showcase as a movie star.

Boys will be boys. This is one of the best movies about masculinity this century — a salty adventure starring a vinegary Bill Murray at the height of his comedic powers. He plays Steve Zissou, a tightly wound, pot-smoking mix of oceanic documentarian Jacques Cousteau and Peter Pan. Anjelica Huston is tremendous anytime she’s onscreen as Zissou’s brilliant wife. Owen Wilson, armed with a shaky Kentucky accent, may or may not be Zissou’s son. Another Anderson regular, the rubber-faced Willem Dafoe, is also memorable as a loyal crony of Zissou’s with a thick German accent. And in her first outing with Anderson, Cate Blanchett glows as a feisty pregnant journalist. The movie’s centerpiece comes early: a slow-moving shot of Zissou’s exploratory vessel, the Belafonte, cut in half to reveal the boat’s sauna, kitchen, library, and other various cabins. It’s a marvelous scene, part theater, part comic book.

Anderson perfects his vibe in this one — a teen comedy about growing up. Schwartzman makes his Anderson debut as baby-faced Max Fischer, a manipulative, lovelorn, wannabe boy genius flunking out of the snooty boarding school he’s obsessed with and attends thanks to a scholarship. Rarely has hubris been portrayed with such compassion. Max is an insufferable, grasping know-it-all. He’s a classic Anderson character: the flailing gifted child. As Harold Blume, an unhappy middle-aged businessman and alumnus of Rushmore Boarding School, Bill Murray also marks his foray into Anderson’s world. Blume takes a shine to Max, and vice versa, a pair of strivers who see themselves in one another until they become romantic rivals of a first-grade teacher played by Olivia Williams. Max’s elaborate school theater production of the 1973 crooked cop drama Serpico and, later, a Vietnam War epic, are highlights.

In 2023, Anderson quietly released four inventive adaptations of beloved (and controversial) author Roald Dahl’s short stories individually on Netflix. Later, they were bundled into a single anthology film, and it’s too bad they were never released on the big screen. The stories are narrated by various actors, including a winning Dev Patel, who calmly breaks the fourth wall in various theatrical settings. These are all slightly surreal stories, gorgeous and minimalist, about gamblers and snakes and sadistic schoolyard bullies. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the longest film of the quartet as Henry Sugar, a wealthy degenerate who becomes obsessed with a guru’s ability to “see without seeing.” The other three shorts are The Swan, Poison, and The Rat Catcher. That last one features Ralph Fiennes as a rat-faced exterminator in a performance that is so strange and wonderful, he should have been nominated for some kind of award. Like Anderson, Dahl is naturally droll and drawn to the absurd and fantastical. But he’s also a misanthrope who is more in touch with his darker side than the director. Surprisingly, Anderson won his only Oscar (so far) for Henry Sugar, deemed by the Academy the Best Live Action Short of 2024.