Wes Anderson Ranked: Part One - Travelogues
Saturday, July 19, 2025 at 1:00PM 
THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME starts streaming on Peacock next Friday, July 25.
Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme already? Wes Anderson's 12th feature film went straight from its Cannes Competition premiere to a worldwide theatrical release, before making its way to digital. The film arrives ready to delight those who've kept faithful to the director's vision and enrage the many who already loathe his style. It's the kind of project that's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the auteur, perpetuating the same strategies he's been developing from the very start. But it's also the sort of thing that inspires a retrospective look at the Texan's filmography, tracing how one goes from Bottle Rocket to these latter confections. There's nobody like him working today. Not on such a scale, at least. Not in Hollywood, where such formalism is a common sacrificial lamb at the altar of conventional appeal.
But, because we love list-making at The Film Experience, this retrospective shall take the form of a personal ranking, divided into three parts (similar to the Hayao Miyazaki one, though less extensive). Hopefully, you'll be on board as I try to explain what each of these pictures means to me and how I've come to fall in love with the cinema of Wes Anderson…
12. THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004)
Sometimes, it can be difficult to negotiate or even articulate the porous barrier separating "best" and "favorite." Indeed, I find myself categorizing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as Wes Anderson's least successful feature while also counting it among his works I most cherish. Because, within this oceanographic mess of a movie, you find some of the director's best scenes and a performance I'd rank among the most extraordinary in his oeuvre. And if you think I'm talking about one of Anderson's regular players, you're dead wrong. Pardon my ongoing failure to love the "right" Cate Blanchett turns, but I'll take the peculiar alchemy of Jane Winslett-Richardson over the likes of Linda Tarr and Jasmine Francis.
There's nothing like it in the actress' filmography, a heady mix of atonal naturalism and vulnerability that, against rhyme or reason, fits right into the auteur's increasingly manicured diorama-like cosmos. It's a paradoxical bit of characterization that's reflected by the picture's lensing, the boldest of Anderson and Robert D. Yeoman's experiments in clashing visual grammars. Not even just clashing, but outright contradictory. And if it's not the best of those experiments, it's damn near close on purely aesthetic levels, combining elements as disparate as the epitome of Mark Friedberg’s dollhouse scenography, unexpected surges of hand-held quasi-realism, and the director's first foray into animation courtesy of Henry Selick's subaquatic menagerie.
If only The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou weren't so damn long and laggy, brittle in tone and morose in rhythm. In between Seu Jorge's Bowie covers, the thing often feels akin to witnessing thick molasses drip down on a cold winter morning. One has to assume part of it is intentional, especially as the story's sea exploration milieu reveals itself as a filmmaker's take on filmmaking and the personalities involved herein. Mostly, it's about old grumpy men escaping their grief by the formulation of artificial purposes, avoidance through whimsy. In the end, we're left with a whole lot of good ideas and a pyrrhic victory of a climax whose sorrowful loveliness highlights how the individual parts are much more valuable than the whole of Wes Anderson's fourth feature film.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is streaming on Hulu. You can also rent and purchase it from Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
11. BOTTLE ROCKET (1996)
A second draft is still just a draft, and that's the reality of Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson's feature-length expansion of a previous short by the same name. Surely, that wouldn't be the reaction I'd have experienced if I were around to appreciate the thing as a full-grown cinephile in 1996. The point stands insofar as, even in the context of its time, the director's first feature strikes me as vaguely embryonic if not a tad too reflective of contemporary trends. Consider its shape or lack thereof. There's a shagginess to the production that's more charming than not, making Bottle Rocket the closest Anderson ever made to a hangout movie, that staple of the '90s American indie scene. But of course, trying to imagine my take on the film way back when is futile.
Watching it from a decidedly 2025 perspective is to experience Bottle Rocket as a game of anticipation. We're all expectant before the screen, waiting for the young artist to find his voice, sharpen his technique, consolidate a vision that would be unique to him and him alone – for better and for worse, depending on who you ask. And yet, for all that some folks like to see vacuous superficiality in Anderson's in-your-face stylistic choices, the plainest of his features is also his most surface-level. Bottle Rocket lacks the filigreed scalpel manifest in the director's later works and their curated aesthetic. As a result, it's unable to pierce skin, too blunt despite what many see as a fresher, more authentic approach.
However, that also means it goes down easy. The exercise comes from a time when the Texan was more inclined to sweetness than melancholy, making for an appetizing palate cleanser in retrospective assessment of his career. It's also the director's most Godardian creation, somewhat close to what the old provocateur was trying to accomplish with A Woman Is a Woman while taking narrative cues from Band of Outsiders. In other words, exactly what you would suppose a budding American cinephile obsessed with French cinema and culture would make as his first proper film. More granularly, it's also a dress rehearsal for The Darjeeling Limited. But there's one other misadventure to explore before we take that train trip to India and its Satyajit Ray homage.
Bottle Rocket is streaming on Kanopy and the Roku Channel. You can also rent and purchase it from Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and the Microsoft Store.
10. ISLE OF DOGS (2018)
Wes Anderson's second animated feature remains the project where, upon reflection, I most gravitate toward agreement with the director's naysayers. At least, inasmuch as I struggle to see the purpose in his usual fussiness, taken to degrees of exacting ostentation heretofore untapped and later abandoned upon the man's return to live-action filmmaking. And better not discuss the culture vulture allegations, all the racial landmines along the way, and the mistranslated gibberish ornamenting some of the most detailed stop-motion sets in recent memory. For what it's worth, I can't help but yearn for a version of Isle of Dogs that wasn't quite so preoccupied with Greta Gerwig's foreign exchange student. In the interest of narrative coherence, if nothing else. Still, I can't say I'm interested in moral objections to the movie.
Especially since, those factors aside, it's hard to deny how impeccably made the whole thing turns out to be. Adam Stockhausen's designs are in top form, the cutting is razor-sharp, and every gesture informs each other to produce a picture that, at times, flows like one continuous movement. Part of me wants to consider these factors in relation to Japanese theater's tradition of economical gesture, but I'm not sure the film would withstand the comparison. Nevertheless, it's awfully dance-like in its perfection, the kind of thing that makes apparent why Anderson would have been attracted to animation in the first place. That said, movement is often defined by its absence, by an interrupting stillness. So, various passages hinge on staccato affectations, a shock stop here and there, sometimes for a laugh, sometimes for a pensieve pause.
All in tandem with the human figure's caricatured expression and the dogs' oscillation between bestial farce and deep sorrow. For the movie's taste for apocalyptic imagery and canine despondency don't preclude Isle of Dogs from being one of Wes Anderson's funniest romps. The comedy is often cutting, mayhap a little mean, but when it hits, you'll be hard pressed to resist a good guffaw. Such chimerical tonalities are more than justified by the text's bizarre convolutions, making this an outlier in weirdness within the director's oeuvre. Sometimes, I even wish it leaned more heavily on the potential for grotesque, taking its macabre matter-of-fact approach to mortality further still than the sight of cadaverous good boys and poisoned wasabi.
Isle of Dogs is streaming on Disney+. You can also rent and purchase it from Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
09. THE DARJEELING LIMITED (2007)
Of all of Anderson's features, The Darjeeling Limited stands out as self-consciously minor in both timbre and ambition, opening and closing with ellipsis. That's not to say we've found a work lacking in value whatsoever. Rather, it's a project grounded by some significant degree of modesty that keeps metaphorical hands from reaching for higher glory and, in that restraint, leads them to a gentility you'll have difficulty finding elsewhere in the director's filmography. Part of it undoubtedly stems from the preponderance of real places and actual natural landscape in the mise-en-scène, as Anderson follows three American brothers travelling to India to meet their mother and maybe find themselves along the way. As ever, grief looms large over the journey, and you can be assured there's a dead patriarch off-screen to add more bitterness to this bittersweet affair.
In some ways, shooting on location reorients the director in his approach to familiar themes, forcing him to consider the material world as it is instead of how he conceives of it in a dream of studio artifices. Not that his trademark fakery is absent. If anything, it's more obvious than ever, for, no matter how real India might be, the American characters traverse it on a most Andersonian fantasy – the titular train, whose heavily decorated interiors shine in shades of sky blue and saffron. Like many Westerners drawn East by Orientalist notions, there are limits to how they engage with India, sometimes only able to regard it as an extension of their imagination. It's only natural that the film's very form should echo that dynamic while also regarding the characters' intentions as folly.
Critical clichés that would posit form versus function, style versus substance, are rendered especially useless in the face of The Darjeeling Limited since Anderson so nimbly converges all those concepts into one. The brothers' flawed perspectives are the director's own self-reflection, the gaze through which we perceive their travelogue a problematization of itself. Plans crumble into dust, life goes on even when we're unable to catch up with it, and the most human thing of all is how we hold on to control amid chaos, often manifest in the act of storytelling and self-curation. These are not just the fundamentals of every Anderson narrative. They are a description of his famed style beyond the more evident signifiers TikTokers love to emulate, imitate, thoroughly misinterpret.
The Darjeeling Limited is streaming on Hulu. You can also rent and purchase it from Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and the Microsoft Store.
As I prepare the rest of this ranking, I'd love to know how you'd order Wes Anderson's twelve feature films. Sound off in the comments!
Reader Comments (1)
Wes Anderson is probably my favourite director. The Royal Tenenbaums is undoubtedly his best. The Life Aquatic did seem overstuffed, and I agree that Cate Blanchett is superb in it.
12. Bottle Rocket
11. Isle of Dogs
10. The Phoenician Scheme
9. The French Dispatch
8. The Life Aquatic
7.The Darjeeling Limited (especially when watched with Hotel Chevalier)
6. Rushmore
5. Asteroid City
4. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. Moonrise Kingdom
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
1. The Royal Tenenbaums