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.
While Anderson's style (or, more specifically, his emphasis of style over substance) was beginning to wear thin with critics following The Royal Tenenbaums, resulting in a rare slump, this 2012 release—his first live-action film in five years—was part of a mid-career renaissance for the director that included his best-reviewed films. Moonrise Kingdom is a hermetically sealed tale of young summer love set on a fictional (and very Andersonian) New England island. Newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward play the 12-year-old leads alongside an ensemble that includes Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman as well as Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Frances McDormand. Critically and commercially successful following a debut at Cannes (as the director's first film to screen in competition there), Kingdom received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay by Anderson and Roman Coppola.
“Literate, melancholy and magical, Moonrise Kingdom is quintessential Wes Anderson, infused with his brand of daffy wit.” —Claudia Puig, USA Today
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