The Phoenician Scheme
Focus Features | Release Date: May 30, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
70
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
37
Mixed:
15
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 18, 2025
His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them. Read full review
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsMay 18, 2025
It goes without saying, but the film dazzles with its trompe-l’oeil-like worldbuilding, which inhabits the fairy tale reality of Anderson’s mind without ever giving over to the wayward indulgence of dream logic. Read full review
91
Original-CinKaren GordonJun 6, 2025
In the end, The Phoenician Scheme has a warm and beating heart. Read full review
90
The AtlanticDavid SimsJun 10, 2025
It’s wiser, and it has the looser silliness that comes with middle age—but it’s looking up at those imposing father figures, tycoons or no, with awe and fear all the same. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonMay 29, 2025
[Anderson's] managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty. Read full review
90
The New YorkerRichard BrodyMay 29, 2025
The stylistic thrills of “The Phoenician Scheme” are inseparable from its turbulent, violent physical action, and it is here that the film proves most surprising and most original: its linear narrative lays bare Anderson’s cinephile obsessions. Read full review
88
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiMay 18, 2025
Del Toro hasn’t had a role this juicy in ages, and he’s captivating at all times. Read full review
85
Film ThreatKent HillJun 23, 2025
This isn’t just an aesthetic exercise. It’s a sandblasted fable about meaning and memory. The Phoenician Scheme doesn’t ask you to love it. It dares you to look closer. And for those who do, the reward is quietly spectacular. Read full review
84
Paste MagazineJason GorberMay 18, 2025
It’s a film that’s filled with so many wonderful moments that it’s a joy to behold, and even at its darkest it unfolds with a sense of radical frivolity. Read full review
83
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerMay 28, 2025
Though the plot might feel a bit overly complicated, given the level of Serious Business being discussed in serious tones by these characters, it never drowns out the key emotional connection. There’s nothing seismic here, just a colorful, enjoyable yarn by one of the best cinematic confectioners around. One with some real heart to it. Read full review
80
NMENick LevineMay 29, 2025
It all adds up to a superior Wes Anderson confection: the surface gleams with a retro sheen, but there’s enough going on underneath to leave a lasting impression. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearMay 28, 2025
You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what his does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan. Read full review
80
LooperReuben BaronMay 21, 2025
Though its long string of wacky plot points might sound convoluted on paper, one shouldn't worry too much about it. The craziest details are mostly there for laughs, and the thematic and emotional through-lines that actually matter remain clear throughout. Read full review
80
iChristina NewlandMay 20, 2025
Made with Anderson’s typically droll tone, it’s often very funny and continually surprising. Read full review
80
SlashfilmBill BriaMay 20, 2025
The film belongs to Del Toro and Threapleton, each of whom steal the film in disparate ways. Read full review
80
Time OutKaleem AftabMay 18, 2025
Watching this Anderson extravaganza is like assembling a meticulously detailed puzzle: at times frustrating, but deeply rewarding when the full picture comes together. Read full review
80
EmpireIana MurrayMay 18, 2025
This is textbook Wes Anderson without falling back on old tricks. The rich world of The Phoenician Scheme can be a lot to take in, but what a view it is. Read full review
80
The IndependentGeoffrey MacnabMay 18, 2025
This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 18, 2025
The dense but undeniably enjoyable saga doubles as a moving father-daughter tale and ultimately seems far more interested in exploring the robber baron spirit of 20th-century capitalism than its consequences. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterLovia GyarkyeMay 18, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme tethers the filmmaker’s existential interests (the unfettered power of the billionaire class, unchecked greed and environmentalism) to the kind of poignant humanistic narrative that’s been missing from his latest offerings. Read full review
80
ColliderTherese LacsonMay 18, 2025
Part caper, part spy movie, and part family drama, The Phoenician Scheme feels both like a return to form for Anderson while also feeling like an evolution for the auteur as his style changes bit by bit. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJun 5, 2025
After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJun 12, 2025
Certainly The Phoenician Scheme still fits within what I’ve come to call “Wes Anderson’s restoration cinema.” It just does so more plainly, less poetically. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJun 9, 2025
For those who enjoy Anderson’s patented quirkiness, The Phoenician Scheme doesn’t disappoint. Assembled with the abettance of longtime friend and collaborator Roman Coppola, Anderson has almost completely dispensed with a conventional storyline in service of a movie that delights in parodying seemingly anything and everything. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 6, 2025
At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferMay 25, 2025
The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times. Read full review
75
The Daily BeastEsther ZuckermanMay 19, 2025
Threapleton is so good in part because you can see the conflict play out on her face, even as she delivers Anderson’s idiosyncratic dialogue with rhythmic perfection. She is also just fantastically cool, rocking a habit like a Met Gala look. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoMay 18, 2025
Buoyed by a traditionally spectacular ensemble, The Phoenician Scheme feels unlikely to be anyone’s favorite Wes Anderson flick, but it’s so easy to like that it’s equally difficult to hate it. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonMay 18, 2025
If there’s hope in these films, it’s in a reestablishment of human connection. As father and daughter, Del Toro and Threapleton (daughter of Kate Winslet), establish real chemistry as people willing to change for the better. Read full review
75
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezMay 18, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme, for all its involved branches, never really comes together deeply or meaningfully. Still, it remains charming and entertaining nonetheless. Read full review
70
IGNA.A. Dowd Jun 5, 2025
A new Wes Anderson movie is always an event, but the writer-director’s latest whirligig comedy, The Phoenician Scheme, might be his slightest in a couple decades. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithMay 29, 2025
It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there. Read full review
70
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonMay 29, 2025
It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 18, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding. Read full review
64
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzMay 28, 2025
All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJun 5, 2025
A beautiful mixed bag, let’s say, all told. But I’ll see The Phoenician Scheme a second time sometime for Cera, who will surely return to the Anderson fold. Read full review
63
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckMay 28, 2025
A vivid presence despite her dry-as-dust tone, Threapleton makes a splendid Andersonian debut here as half the father-daughter duo, along with Benicio Del Toro, that drives the director’s latest creation. Their emerging relationship is what stands out amid the familiar Andersonian details: the picture-book aesthetic. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 19, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual. Read full review
60
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannMay 18, 2025
For all The Phoenician Scheme's eccentric thrills, sardonic performances, and globe-trotting adventure, the film still feels limited in the grand scheme of things. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesTara BradyMay 18, 2025
The machinations find a charming focus in the thawing between Del Toro and Threapleton. Both actors bring a jouissance to the slightly jaded milieu. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 18, 2025
It is always entertaining, and delivered with the usual conviction and force but with less of the romantic extravagance than we’ve seen before, less of the childlike loneliness that has been detectable in his greatest movies. Read full review
60
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 18, 2025
Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet—and, in some ways, provocative—moral argument. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 18, 2025
Although The Phoenician Scheme is transporting — an effect amplified by Alexandre Desplat’s lilting orchestral score, supplemented by selections from Stravinsky and Beethoven — the narrative proves to be fussy rather than delightful. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreMay 18, 2025
It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole. Read full review
60
BBCNicholas BarberMay 18, 2025
It's good fun, but unless your tolerance for the director's idiosyncrasies is stratospherically high, the chances are that the story will seem too random for you to care about by the halfway point. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyMay 20, 2025
The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.) Read full review
58
The Film StageLuke HicksMay 19, 2025
It’s often pleasant, pretty, impressive, and well-scored (and we’ll note the spectacle of design shortly), but that isn’t enough for someone of his caliber. Where is the emotion? The feeling? The Owen Wilson perspective of his storytelling soul? Read full review
55
The Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeMay 30, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme sees Anderson indulging in all of his usual design fetishes (we don’t just get precisely-lettered labels on ornate boxes, we also get the yellowing cellophane tape affixed to those labels) without seeming to get around to a story or characters or themes. Read full review
50
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJun 6, 2025
It’s not terrible, but it’s an elegantly filmed stumble. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 6, 2025
Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be. Read full review
40
SlateDana StevensMay 29, 2025
For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass. Read full review
40
The TimesKevin MaherMay 18, 2025
On the positive side, Threapleton, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is sensational. Quietly commanding, but always glowing with charisma, she is the discovery here. Read full review
25
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonJun 3, 2025
After watching the worst Anderson movie yet, I was envious of the guy who blew up; he got to leave after only two minutes of this wretched comedy, the title of which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel adaptation. Read full review
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