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 newest film finds him dabbling in sci-fi for the first time in his career. The plot-light, 1950s-set comedy follows the numerous attendees of a Junior Stargazer convention in a remote desert town. The huge ensemble boasts Tom Hanks plus plenty of familiar faces—including Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, and Adrien Brody—but not, for the first time since Bottle Rocket, Bill Murray, who dropped out at the last moment after contracting Covid. (He was replaced by Steve Carell.) Reviews following Asteroid City's Cannes premiere in May of 2023 were generally positive but far from great. Some critics felt it was somehow even more emotionally distant than the director's past work, yet others found it more moving than his typical films.
“Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.” —Owen Gleiberman, Variety
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