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The Darjeeling Limited underscores the folly of these men riding the rails with mountains of literal and metaphorical baggage in tow, and how the country humbles them before any healing can begin. Yet Anderson, inspired by Technicolor exoticism of Jean Renoir’s The River, understands that he and his characters - three semi-estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) going through grief and personal setbacks - come to India as outsiders and turn that liability into an asset.
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There’s something perverse about the clash between the unruly sensuality of India and the hermetic quality of a Wes Anderson production, which fetishizes small details, like the complementary pleasures of sweet lime and savory snacks, and casts the locals as mere stepping stones to emotional growth. To a certain extent, The Darjeeling Limited is an unseemly act of spiritual tourism, no better than Eat Pray Love or countless other films about privileged white Americans turning a foreign landscape into the site of their holistic transformation. After a fresh rewatch of eight of them - and a first viewing of the new one - here’s how things stand today:
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Any other day, the top seven could shift around a few spots and still feel about right, though Anderson’s best films have layers of emotion and thematic depth that often don’t reveal themselves until two or three or four viewings in, when a small glance or a piece of production design takes on a significance that wasn’t apparent before. To my mind, Anderson is nine for nine, and the separation on the list below is a matter of degrees rather than huge swings in quality between one feature and the next. Every film is exactly as Anderson intended it to be, without the hit-or-miss or ebb-and-flow nature of most directorial careers. Fox and his superb new comedy, Isle of Dogs. His debut feature, Bottle Rocket, could be called a blueprint of things to come, but beyond that, every moment in his films has been completely thought through and fussed over, which explains why the frame-by-frame arduousness of stop-motion animation was such a good fit for Fantastic Mr.
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And though his commercial fortunes have waxed and waned, there’s no evidence that he’s ever cared to fit into the marketplace - or even would know how to do so if he could. He doesn’t do failed experiments or gun-for-hire studio projects or one-offs in a minor key. Ranking the films of Wes Anderson feels like a fool’s game, because he’s an auteur’s auteur, with a sensibility so rigorously defined and articulated that you’re either inclined to embrace it fully or reject it completely. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture