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.
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
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