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 almost a decade after his first animated film, Anderson's second stop-motion feature was another Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature—and also brought him a directing prize from the 2018 Berlinale, where the film first premiered. Isle of Dogs is the director's only film to be set in Japan, albeit in a fictional city—and one in which dogs have been banished to Trash Island due to a pandemic. Do those dogs speak? Yes they do, and they sound a lot like Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, and Bob Balaban, among others. Most (but not all) critics were charmed by the Kurosawa-influenced result, deeming it one of Anderson's funniest films to date.
“Anderson has a sharp grasp of slapstick and visual humor, and he uses deadpan about as well as anybody since the great silent comedians. But for all the laughs and the social resonance, Anderson and his team have first and foremost conjured a work of spellbinding loveliness.” —Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice
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