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…