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.
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
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