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.
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
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|