The best Wes Anderson movies: from Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom

Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Angelica Houston, Danny Glover, Kumar Pallana in The Royal Tenenbaums.

The Royal Tenenbaums: heart-warming tale about a dysfunctional family with 'emotional wallop'

(Image credit: Alamy / RGR Collection)

published 9 April 2025

It's easy to get drawn into the "perfectly symmetrical world" of Wes Anderson, said Esquire. From "whimsical costuming" to eclectic soundtracks, the celebrated director's films are "always meticulous, always quirky, and always fun". With Anderson's 13th film, "The Phoenician Scheme", set to be released in May, we take a look at his best movies.

Bottle Rocket (1996)

"No surprise that Anderson's first film is his most atypical", said Variety. The "bumbling Texan heist caper" about three friends who embark on a crime spree plays like "early Tarantino" but with a more "neurotic bent". This is certainly Anderson's most "uneven film" and you can see the director working out his "signature visual and tonal style". But it's also more "messily alive" than some of his "polished" later works – and you can see why it caught the attention of Martin Scorsese.

This "dry, stylistically daring coming-of-age comedy" is Anderson's "darkest" movie, said The Guardian. The action follows Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a "precocious" student at Rushmore Academy who falls for widowed schoolteacher (Olivia Williams) and befriends a wealthy industrialist (Bill Murray). "Rushmore" is Anderson's most "focused" film, where he demonstrates a "willingness" to explore "difficult" subjects his later movies sometimes steer clear of.

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Anderson's "breakout" movie about the eccentric Tenenbaum family still stands as his "greatest" work, said Empire. Gene Hackman stars as Royal, a "gruff" and "terminally unavailable" New York patriarch, who attempts to win back his estranged children by announcing he has terminal stomach cancer. His "formerly gifted, now emotionally drifted" kids (Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow) reluctantly gather under one roof, leading to a series of "funny, droll, and sometimes devastating" events. Anderson occasionally gets a bit of "flak" for being too "buttoned-up for his own good", but he brings real "emotional wallop" to this heartfelt tale about a dysfunctional family.

It's an indicator of Anderson's "critical stock" back in 2009 that both George Clooney and Meryl Streep "jumped aboard" to voice Mr and Mrs Fox in the director's first stop-motion animation, said Empire. Plenty of "Andersonian tics" are added to Roald Dahl's tale of the "chicken-stealing vulpine gadabout": the titular character is a thief-turned-newspaper-columnist with a complicated family life. This is Anderson at his most "carefree and buoyant" – and the animation is as "meticulously" crafted and full of "invention" as any of his live-action movies.

Set mostly in 1965, the filmmaker's tale of "barely-adolescent runaways" follows Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), a pair of 12-year-olds who fall in love and elope into the wilderness of a fictional New England island, said GQ. Bruce Willis features as a "no-nonsense but sensitive" policeman, while Edward Norton makes an appearance as an "earnest scoutmaster". This is one of Anderson's most "touching" portrayals of masculinity, and one of his "sweetest, gentlest movies" to date.

Ralph Fiennes put in a masterful performance under Anderson's "watchful eye" as Gustave, the iconic concierge of a hotel in a fictional European country on the verge of World War II, said GQ. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" scooped four Academy Awards (costumes, makeup, production design and score) in 2014 and received numerous other accolades. The powerful "vision of encroaching fascism" lends the film an "emotional heft" that Anderson expertly "counterbalances" by making much of the action a "rollicking, screwball-ish caper".

Anderson's second stop-motion animation feature might be his "flat-out weirdest" movie to date, said Variety. The "dystopian" tale about a "band of abandoned mutts" that team up to overthrow a "corrupt Japanese dictatorship" might sound "frenetic" but its "languid" pace ensures viewers have plenty of time to appreciate the "delirious intricacy" of the filmmaker's futuristic world. In all, it's a "curiously hypnotic" experience.

Like all of Anderson's top films, "The French Dispatch" is "both utterly exquisite and deceptively complex", said The Independent. "Packed" with Hollywood stars and "favoured collaborators", the movie focuses on the director's "twin loves: the country of France and the journalism of the New Yorker magazine". Indulging in the "romantic fantasy" of a time when journalists were "handsomely paid" and "creatively free", the film brings to life a collection of stories from the final issue of an American magazine published in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé.

Irenie Forshaw is a features writer at The Week, covering arts, culture and travel. She began her career in journalism at Leeds University, where she wrote for the student newspaper, The Gryphon, before working at The Guardian and The New Statesman Group. Irenie then became a senior writer at Elite Traveler, where she oversaw The Experts column.