Every Wes Anderson Movie Ranked Worst to Best
Comic Sans, naturalistic acting, and Dutch angles? Sorry: You've come to the wrong gallery. Few directors have as precise and instantly identifiable a visual and storytelling style as Wes Anderson, the Texas-born director who emerged from the 1990s indie scene to eventual stardom and the ability to attract seemingly every living A-list actor—even as he never left the arthouse behind. A pair of 2023 releases (including The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, already filmed and due for a Netflix release late this year) will bring Anderson's film count to a full dozen, and those features have collected plenty of excellent reviews (and 15 Oscar nominations) along the way.
But which Wes Anderson films are truly exceptional, and which are "merely" good? In the gallery on this page we rank every one of the director's films to date from worst to best. The films are ranked by their Metascores, which encapsulate the opinions of top professional film critics at the time of each film's release.
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
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