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.
After the critical (if not necessarily commercial) success of Anderson's second film, Rushmore, Disney doubled the director's production budget for his next feature, a 2001 dramedy which follows the members of a wealthy and eccentric family in a surreal version of New York City. Much of that money went to a star-studded cast that included Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Danny Glover (alongside a returning Bill Murray and Luke and Owen Wilson). One of Anderson's few box office hits—its $71 million total makes it the second-highest-grossing film of his career—Tenenbaums was warmly received by most critics and earned an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Anderson and Owen Wilson, the first such honor for either man.
“Anderson's cinematic style gets more adventurous from one movie to the next, and he begins this story with bursts of originality that leave his respected 'Rushmore' far behind.” —David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor
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