Every Wes Anderson Movie Ranked Worst to Best

Divisive even among Wes Anderson fans, the director's fourth movie stars Bill Murray as the title character, a Jacques Cousteau-esque oceanographer who leads a motley crew (including Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson, and Seu George, who appears throughout the film to sing David Bowie songs in Portuguese) in a mission of revenge (against a shark) on his research vessel Belafonte. Released in 2004 three years after Anderson's first hit (The Royal Tenenbaums), Zissou was a box office flop and remains the director's worst-reviewed feature to date. Though the film certainly has its admirers, many critics at the time found it overly whimsical and ultimately lifeless.

Anderson shared a screenplay credit on Zissou with fellow indie auteur Noah Baumbach, and the pair would again collaborate on the former's 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox, while Anderson would also produce Baumbach's 2005 breakthrough The Squid and the Whale.

"Murray is always pleasurable company, and his barely suppressed soulfulness might've supported this dawdling big-fish story if its insistent larkiness had abated and let a little reality in, as had 'Rushmore.'" —Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

Released in 2007, Anderson's fifth film scored only slightly better with critics than his previous feature, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. A more modestly scaled (and budgeted) film, Darjeeling centers on three estranged brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Anderson first-timer Adrien Brody) who reunite for a train trip/spiritual journey in India. Schwartzman also co-wrote the screenplay (a first for him) along with Anderson and Roman Coppola; the latter would also return for Moonrise Kingdom.

"The men are fuzzily defined and the film feels incomplete. The devil may be in the details, but for the first time, Anderson's obsession with them has caused him to lose sight of the bigger picture." —Scott Tobias, A.V. Club

Emerging during the golden age of indie cinema, Anderson's uncharacteristically loose 1996 debut lacks the radical symmetry, exacting world-building, and precise color schemes that would become some of the director's hallmarks. But Bottle Rocket is still recognizably Andersonian in several elements, including its eccentric characters, an offbeat and humorous story (a surprisingly cheerful shaggy dog tale centering on a trio of immature and rather hapless criminals who plan a heist), cinematography by Robert Yeoman (who would return for every subsequent Anderson live-action film), and its use of stars Owen and Luke Wilson, who both appear here in their big-screen debuts (alongside their older brother, Andrew Wilson).

Owen Wilson also co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson, with the pair expanding their 1994 short film of the same name (with the help of producer James L. Brooks) and setting both in their native Texas. Despite relatively positive reviews and the addition of James Caan (the film's sole established star) to the cast, Bottle Rocket was little seen at the time of its release, but it eventually found an audience on home video and joined the Criterion Collection in 2008.

"A hilarious, inventive and goofy breath of fresh air." —Desson Thomson, The Washington Post

Anderson's second film to screen in competition at Cannes, 2021's The French Dispatch is a France-set anthology of four stories drawn from the final issue of the fictitious magazine (think The New Yorker) of the title. The episodic nature of the story—which, despite early reports, did not turn out to be a musical—means that the cast is somehow even bigger than that of the typical Anderson film, with Owen Wilson, Frances McDormand, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, and Bill Murray just a few of the big names on hand. A bit more divisive than the preceding Anderson films of the past decade, Dispatch earned some of the usual complaints—it's too cold, fussy, and distant to make much of an impact, and it repeats many of the stylistic tics we've already seen from the director—but it also impressed quite a few reviewers with its pacing, sense of fun, and eye for detail.

"Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display." —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

Anderson's newest film finds him dabbling in sci-fi for the first time in his career. The plot-light, 1950s-set comedy follows the numerous attendees of a Junior Stargazer convention in a remote desert town. The huge ensemble boasts Tom Hanks plus plenty of familiar faces—including Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, and Adrien Brody—but not, for the first time since Bottle Rocket, Bill Murray, who dropped out at the last moment after contracting Covid. (He was replaced by Steve Carell.) Reviews following Asteroid City's Cannes premiere in May of 2023 were generally positive but far from great. Some critics felt it was somehow even more emotionally distant than the director's past work, yet others found it more moving than his typical films.

"Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it's for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them." —Owen Gleiberman, Variety

After the critical (if not necessarily commercial) success of Anderson's second film, Rushmore, Disney doubled the director's production budget for his next feature, a 2001 dramedy which follows the members of a wealthy and eccentric family in a surreal version of New York City. Much of that money went to a star-studded cast that included Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Danny Glover (alongside a returning Bill Murray and Luke and Owen Wilson). One of Anderson's few box office hits—its $71 million total makes it the second-highest-grossing film of his career—Tenenbaums was warmly received by most critics and earned an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Anderson and Owen Wilson, the first such honor for either man.

"Anderson's cinematic style gets more adventurous from one movie to the next, and he begins this story with bursts of originality that leave his respected 'Rushmore' far behind." —David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor

Released almost a decade after his first animated film, Anderson's second stop-motion feature was another Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature—and also brought him a directing prize from the 2018 Berlinale, where the film first premiered. Isle of Dogs is the director's only film to be set in Japan, albeit in a fictional city—and one in which dogs have been banished to Trash Island due to a pandemic. Do those dogs speak? Yes they do, and they sound a lot like Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, and Bob Balaban, among others. Most (but not all) critics were charmed by the Kurosawa-influenced result, deeming it one of Anderson's funniest films to date.

"Anderson has a sharp grasp of slapstick and visual humor, and he uses deadpan about as well as anybody since the great silent comedians. But for all the laughs and the social resonance, Anderson and his team have first and foremost conjured a work of spellbinding loveliness." —Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice

While one could argue that many Wes Anderson films are basically cartoons, this 2009 adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl children's book of the same name was the director's first official animated feature. Unsurprisingly, Anderson's exacting visual style translates well to stop-motion animation, while his ability to mix whimsy with a hint of darkness make him an excellent match for Dahl's story of an overly adventurous fox and an animal community forced to defend themselves from a group of farmers. George Clooney and Meryl Streep are just some of the big names in a voice cast that also includes Anderson repertory players Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Bill Murray. Fox went on to score a Best Animated Feature nomination at the 2010 Academy Awards.

Anderson would again tackle the works of Roald Dahl with 2023's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

"The result is an instant classic. The material allows Anderson to neutralize the most irritating aspects of his work (the precociousness, the sense of white-bread privilege) and maximize the most endearing (the comic timing, the dollhouse ordering of invented worlds)." —J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

While Anderson's style (or, more specifically, his emphasis of style over substance) was beginning to wear thin with critics following The Royal Tenenbaums, resulting in a rare slump, this 2012 release—his first live-action film in five years—was part of a mid-career renaissance for the director that included his best-reviewed films. Moonrise Kingdom is a hermetically sealed tale of young summer love set on a fictional (and very Andersonian) New England island. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward play the 12-year-old leads alongside an ensemble that includes Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman as well as Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Frances McDormand. Critically and commercially successful following a debut at Cannes (as the director's first film to screen in competition there), Kingdom received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay by Anderson and Roman Coppola.

"Literate, melancholy and magical, Moonrise Kingdom is quintessential Wes Anderson, infused with his brand of daffy wit." —Claudia Puig, USA Today

Wes Anderson's second film of 2023 is his first Netflix film (though it will also receive a limited theatrical run despite its 40-minute runtime). It's also the director's second Roald Dahl adaptation (following 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox), this time adapting the author's 1977 short story collection. Four of the book's seven stories are included in the Netflix anthology (broken up into individual shorts) whose ensemble includes Benedict Cumberbatch (playing the title character), Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend, Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade. Critics enjoyed Henry Sugar following its Venice premiere, with even those reviewers who had been growing tired of Anderson's unrelenting style seemingly more tolerant of the director's tics in this shorter format. The film eventually earned Anderson his first career Oscar when it took the trophy for Best Live Action Short in early 2024.
"Given the film's abridged runtime and its genuine playfulness, even Wes-skeptics might find themselves cracking a wry grin from time to time." Ben Croll, The Wrap

An instant cult classic, Anderson's second feature was the film that put him on the map and established his trademark style (from which he has never truly departed). The quirky, low-budget 1998 comedy set in a private high school made a star out of then-18-year-old Jason Schwartzman in his debut role, and also revived the film career of former SNL star Bill Murray, who was coming off a series of mid-1990s duds but built upon the raves he earned for Rushmore to take on more dramatic roles in a number of acclaimed indie films (including, a few years later, Lost in Translation, for which he received an Oscar nomination). Anderson's Bottle Rocket collaborators Luke and Owen Wilson also returned here, with the former playing a supporting role and the latter once again co-writing the screenplay with the director.

"One of the freshest, richest, most original films to come out of Hollywood in a very long time." —Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

Anderson's best-reviewed film to date is also the only one of his films to receive a Best Picture nomination. In fact, the 2014 dramedy received nine Oscar nominations in all—including Anderson's only career Best Director nomination—and it won four of those, all in technical categories. Also the director's highest-grossing film to date (with over $100 million more than the next-closest title), The Grand Budapest Hotel is set during various points in the 20th century in a fictional Eastern European country and features one of Anderson's biggest ensemble casts to date. Ralph Fiennes has the meatiest role in a roster that also includes Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Jude Law, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Tony Revolori (then a teenager in his first big role) and Jeff Goldblum, among others.

"The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mr. Anderson's eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it's just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect." —A.O. Scott, The New York Times