Despite an abundance of plot strands and characters, Anderson’s latest drills down into the father-daughter relationship depicted by its leads, Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton.
Wes Anderson’s new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is a funny-ha-ha comedy, but there’s nothing funny about its story, which involves a wealthy industrialist’s attempts to realize a grandiose infrastructure project. Anderson’s signature is instantly recognizable in the movie’s decorative production design, its frontal and symmetrical framings, and its antic, densely plotted story—and equally in the fact that it is a violent and death-haunted action film, filled with fights and chases. Yet, compared with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) and the work that has followed, the new film is relatively simple: rather than nesting stories within other stories, it follows its protagonist closely. The result is a heightened clarity—revealing the distinctive world view that Anderson’s methods embody—and an unusually direct emotionalism.
“The Phoenician Scheme” is the story of an amusingly bad man who becomes a little less amusing and a little less bad. Benicio del Toro, alternately glowering and glib, stars as Anatole (Zsa-zsa) Korda, an Onassis-like figure of uninhibited ruthlessness. The action, which runs from 1950 to late 1951, begins as Zsa-zsa, a proud citizen of no country, flits about in a private Air Korda plane that he knows to be a target of saboteurs. Sure enough, mid-flight, a hole is blown in the fuselage, and Zsa-zsa, taking the controls, crash-lands the plane. Unconscious, he has a near-death experience—filmed in black-and-white with a sense of both comedy and wonderment—in which he arrives in a cotton-puff Heaven under the severe scrutiny of a berobed gatekeeper (played by Willem Dafoe).
Badly wounded, Zsa-zsa recuperates in his sixteenth-century Italian palazzo, and summons his twenty-year-old daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun. She’s the eldest of his ten children (the other nine are boys), and he wants her to renounce her vocation and become the heir to his enterprises, at a critical moment. A grand project in the fictitious country of Phoenicia, thirty years in the making—involving a canal, a tunnel, a railroad line, and a dam—may finally be coming to fruition, and Zsa-zsa, who is set to get five per cent of the profits, will stop at nothing to realize it. The film sardonically conjures a golden age of interventionist arrogance. Though there’s no explicit mention of the Cold War, there’s plenty of espionage and intrigue. Zsa-zsa’s many enemies include American secret agents, an international business consortium, and a well-armed band of revolutionaries, led by a man named Sergio (Richard Ayoade). Zsa-zsa’s scheme comes at a high human cost: it may bring modernization to Phoenicia, but it will depend on slave labor. This doesn’t trouble his conscience any more than does his reputation for financial misdeeds. But the scheme puts several targets on his back: governments and corporate entities see him as a loose cannon, and the revolutionaries see him as a predator.
It’s no wonder that Zsa-zsa is accustomed to assassination attempts. At meals, he puts a drop of reagent into his drinks, and he is unruffled when one turns out to be poisoned. He is at home with violence, literally: he keeps a box full of hand grenades nearby at all times and offers them to guests as if they were cigars or chocolates. He endures danger, such as a submersion in quicksand, with gruff equanimity. He also keeps his cool in heated dealings with a far-flung cast of associates whose backing he needs: with Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), he faces two Americans (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston) in a high-stakes basketball shoot-out; he takes a bullet for Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) in the Frenchman’s Art Deco night club; he negotiates with the Newark Syndicate’s hipster representative, Marty (Jeffrey Wright), with the aid of deadly force. Closer to home, he hopes to marry a rich second cousin, Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), and seeks the support of an estranged half brother, called Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch).
This last relationship becomes particularly fraught. Zsa-zsa has outlived all three of his wives, including Liesl’s mother, and Liesl has heard rumors that he killed her, or had her killed. When she confronts him, he pins the blame on Nubar, and Liesl demands that her uncle be punished. (Threapleton, in her first major feature-film role, has a striking presence, both quietly fierce and effortlessly wry.) Thus the movie’s financial and martial machinations take place within a more elemental family drama: in order to win his daughter’s allegiance and affection, Zsa-zsa must pursue a mock-Shakespearean plot of fratricidal revenge. “The Phoenician Scheme” is Anderson’s most sentimental movie—the story of a merciless man so desperate for his devout daughter’s love that he’s willing to kill for it.
As with all Anderson’s films, the design of “The Phoenician Scheme” is jubilantly exquisite. Anderson’s aesthetic is one of the miracles and mysteries of the modern cinema, and “The Phoenician Scheme” is filled with some of the most eye-catching baubles and gizmos of his career, such as two corncob pipes, one plain and one fancy, that Liesl smokes; a blood-transfusion unit that works by squeeze bulb; and shoeboxes in which Zsa-zsa keeps his key documents. (Anderson’s late father-in-law, a businessman named Fouad Malouf, used shoeboxes in this way, and the film is dedicated to him.) Meticulously imagined and crafted objects are central to Anderson’s world, and they express more than taste and delight. He showcases them like madeleines of many flavors, summoning personal memories and associations along with broader cultural memories and archetypes.
The stylistic thrills of “The Phoenician Scheme” are inseparable from its turbulent, violent physical action, and it is here that the film proves most surprising and most original: its linear narrative lays bare Anderson’s cinephile obsessions. There’s something Hitchcockian about Anderson—albeit in reverse. Hitchcock’s movies stylize violence; Anderson makes style violent. In film after film, his onscreen ideal of beauty embodies the spirit of opposition and revolt. Paul Valéry said that taste is formed of a thousand distastes, and Anderson’s aesthetic is a furious affirmation fuelled by those many implicit repudiations. The most powerful exemplar of rebellion in Anderson’s œuvre is his vision of Zsa-zsa against the world.
Zsa-zsa has a curated aesthetic of his own. He’s an art collector and a student of antiquity who always has his nose in a book. His staff includes, as a paid companion and tutor, an entomologist named Bjorn (played by Michael Cera, using one of the most outrageous accents this side of Walter Matthau), who travels with caged insects and is entrusted with a case containing all Zsa-zsa’s cash. Zsa-zsa pursues pleasure and faces danger with the same nonchalance, but as his wounds accumulate he can no longer ignore them. With each near-death experience, he has another vision of the afterlife (including ones in which Bill Murray plays God, or vice versa), and these visions arouse fear and something like conscience. When Zsa-zsa’s spirit of opposition gets this cautionary reboot, it turns him against himself and the milieu in which he prospers.
The film cites a number of real-life models for Zsa-zsa; in addition to Anderson’s late father-in-law, there’s Calouste Gulbenkian, the Ottoman Armenian industrialist who pioneered the oil business in the Middle East, and whose nickname, Mr. Five Per Cent, is shared by Zsa-zsa. But the crucial model is a cinematic one, from Orson Welles’s 1955 film “Mr. Arkadin,” in which Welles plays a tycoon determined to keep his grown daughter from finding out that he got his start in criminal enterprises. Anderson stands the original on its head: grooming Liesl as a successor, Zsa-zsa introduces her to a world where cunning and force hold sway. To his daughter, this international man of mystery is utterly transparent. Notably, it’s Nubar, with his full, square beard and upswept hair and eyebrows, who physically resembles Welles’s Arkadin, and this resemblance provides a clue to the story that Anderson is telling about family and identity, about truth and falsehood, about who’s awaiting his comeuppance and who’s on the road to redemption.
Anderson’s cinematic allusions in “The Phoenician Scheme” make sharp intertextual points. When Zsa-zsa proudly raises the curtain on an enormous, electrified, mechanical diorama of his scheme’s many components, the display mimics a scene in Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, “The Rules of the Game,” in which a rich aristocrat unveils a room-size electrical music box. Renoir’s film dramatized the end of an era (of high-society frivolities, as war loomed), and so does Anderson’s; namely, the end of the age of buccaneer industrialism. The bureaucrats Zsa-zsa reviles may well take over, but he may still have the satisfaction of victory on his own terms. In evoking Renoir and Welles, Anderson, born in 1969, also evokes the mores of their times, via a style that couldn’t have existed then. He looks back to a harder world of blood poetry and clangorous capitalism, extracting and distilling its virtues without nostalgia and with shuddering reminders of its vices. Anderson’s own intensely self-aware art represents, albeit with an awareness of loss, a sense of progress. ♦
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I am looking forward to seeing this, as while I really enjoy the aesthetic of Anderson, I increasingly wish someone would push him out of his comfort zone. His films are the same thing repeated in different circumstances with different characters.
Maybe he isn’t interested in doing anything other than what he’s doing, and at some level that’s all the justification he needs. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. But I do think the cinematic world as a whole would benefit from him experimenting a little more, trying a novel format, and so on.
By Fricken 2025-06-0213:19 He has put out 5 films in the last 7 years. Wes Anderson might just be a victim of his own productivity, his work could benefit from some scarcity.
Anderson nonetheless is still quite inventive and experimental in his films, he's always doing new things, and usually those new things are in the details, and of course, those new things tend to play into his trademark style. Asteroid City played like an excuse to play around with clever camera movements. Isle of Dogs did weird things where the image and sound were providing diverging narratives that would come back together.
Anderson's trademark style is annoying to me only when my interest in the characters and story is lacklustre, but for every Anderson film I'm not that into I know at least one person who loves it.
I think it would be unreasonable to expect him to reinvent his filmmaking style dramatically. There are other filmmakers out there making movies for those who've had their fill of quirky Wes Anderson flicks.
>His films are the same thing repeated in different circumstances with different characters.
I am not sure what you mean, Asteroid City with its complex structure utilizing metafiction to explore things mostly removed from the characters and the story does not have much in common with The Royal Tenenbaums other than aesthetic with its fairly simple and direct use of character to explore the individual and family. Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?
When you go see an Anderson film, you have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going to get. The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness, and pretty much everything else is largely the same across his films. I think this is obvious (?) to most people. Yes, there are individual differences between films, but I don’t think my opinion is an uncommon one.
There are more genres than action and superhero. A whole world of cinema, in fact. So it would be great if Anderson took his formidable skills and tried something new. A selfish request from a viewer, sure, but I just never feel like he’s trying to improve as a filmmaker and is merely doing what is comfortable to him.
By mda 2025-06-028:59 Just to add to your sentiment, I agree with you. The setup of his films became so similar to each other in many ways, same quirky (slightly insane) characters, same pastel colors, same textures. All subjective of course, but I found his later movies soulless and hard to watch.
By ofalkaed 2025-06-029:04 >The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness
Other than character development those are all part of the aesthetic and in his last two he mostly extended that aesthetic directly to the characters, dropped the essentially realistic relatable characters and turned them into caricatures who don't really develop; devices of the story and theme instead of what drives the story and develops theme. I would say he was doing things uncomfortable for him with The French Dispatch, which is why he did not quite pull off the meta aspect. I think his interests are in improving on story and narrative and exploring what can be done with them within the medium and his aesthetic is a means to those ends, a way to push things out of the normal perspectives and give him more room to do things like make highly metafictional films without going all out experimental.
I am perfectly aware there are other genres.
By brookst 2025-06-0219:06 Agreed. He’s like those amazing musicians who keep using the same chords, instruments, arrangement, and lyrical content over and over.
What I wouldn’t give to see Anderson tackle something really novel (for him). A period-piece tragedy; a college road trip; a horror film.
By myth_drannon 2025-06-029:291 reply Same for Nolan's movies.
I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
By myth_drannon 2025-06-0212:392 reply The Dark Knight Rises also had an atom bomb. Nolan has a thing for nuclear detonations.
also, timers. What absolutely killed Nolan for me was when someone pointed out that he's virtually unable to create tension without a literal timer, be that bombs, watches, countdowns, what have you. Ever single damn movie. There's even a tick-tock sound from Nolan's stopwatch in the soundtrack of Dunkirk.
For some reason, this made me think of the countdown timer in Galaxy Quest that counts down but stops before getting to zero because the ship's design is based on a TV show.
"Spoiler alert", I guess, if you've not seen Galaxy Quest in the quarter century since it was released.
By magicalhippo 2025-06-0219:31 Which, if you haven't, you absolutely should!
You can edit your comments. I didn't reply to your second one so you can delete it if you want.
By rkomorn 2025-06-0214:02 It was sarcasm. 25 year old movies don't need spoiler alerts.
But also, in a meta way, it wasn't a spoiler anyway because countdowns never reach zero anyway.
By awongh 2025-06-0214:54 Except in Oppenheimer he was like, I'll just do the actual atom bomb instead. I'm glad that he knows himself well enough that he went right to the source.
The remark "Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?" implies that any desire for Anderson to evolve beyond his current style stems from a limited understanding of cinema, rather than a genuine wish for artistic expansion. Imo this rhetorical question can be seen as an attempt to dismiss the critique by framing it as unsophisticated. I found it a little condescending.
You are making assumptions about my intent and my feelings regarding superhero and action movies. I am not sure I would call most of Anderson's output particularly sophisticated and absolutely would not write off entire genres as unsophisticated, many dramas offer nothing more than an emotional appeal and many action movies offer considerably more.
There was nothing rhetorical about my question.
Haven't seen Asteroid City, but metafiction and exploration of side-plots removed from the characters are absolutely present in Tenenbaums (presented as a book with chapters) and Grand Budapest Hotel. I guess to a lesser degree.
Sure, most people trivialise his "quirkiness" in annoying ways (there is depth and poetry in some of his movies that go beyond eye-pleasing symmetry) but the guy could take a risk or two, artistically speaking. His Fantastic Mr Fox was charming, and switching to animation is not at all easy for a live-action director!
By ofalkaed 2025-06-029:33 Before The French Dispatch his use of meta was just a side effect of the style, it broke the fourth wall which you can call meta but it is sort of meaningless if all it does is break the forth wall. In the French Dispatch and Asteroid City he develops it and uses it towards theme, we can not fully understand them without taking in account the meta.
By colechristensen 2025-06-028:50 There are many common factors to all of his films and not a lot of change in those common factors. Especially because many of them are rather unique to him the continued variation on the same artistic themes gets a bit tired.
By apwell23 2025-06-029:23 Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie
By ramesh31 2025-06-0210:59 >But I do think the cinematic world as a whole would benefit from him experimenting a little more, trying a novel format, and so on.
But his format is novel in the entire world of cinema right now, even if it doesn't change from film to film. People go to see a Wes Anderson film for the same reason Marvel fans line up for the next blockbuster; you know what you are going to get, and you want more of it. He takes it to the extreme in this one, where it works entirely visually as an almost homage to the days of silent film. We would benefit greatly from more filmmakers (and studios willing to take them on) who have such a defined aesthetic vision and are able to develop it over such a long a period, rather than just mashing together whatever expectations a focus group might have, or going off on flights of fancy that have little artistic continuity.
For better or for worse, Anderson is very much an auteur [0], like Godard or Woody Allen. Almost certainly in a self-conscious way.
Complaining that Anderson movies feel like Anderson movies seems almost to miss the point: do we look at Picasso's works and complain about the consistent style he developed? The self-imposed constraints of his own style give him a framework to build his art from (it's often said that constraints foster creativity after all) and a particular craft to master.
Conversely, the form might always be an Anderson movie, but the function of each film can be quite different. By sticking with and mastering a particular aesthetic he frees himself to explore things besides aesthetic wildly. What does The Royal Tenenbaums have in common with, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel, besides Futura?
That said, I do feel like Asteroid City in particular was a stretch for him: there's nothing quite like "you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep" anywhere else in his filmography. It felt like along with the more extreme artifice came a more extreme intensity of feeling: to me it's a film that really came from a very anguished and grieving place. I haven't read the article or seen the new film yet, but based on the headline it sounds like this might be the overall direction his work is heading.
Both Picasso and Godard changed their style dramatically over their careers. I'm not familiar enough with Woody Allen's movies to comment on them.
These are good examples to show how being an auteur doesn't mean you need to stick to the same stereotypical aesthetic. Anderson is still pretty young, so maybe he is shifting in one direction or another. But as far as his work goes as of today, the range of stylistic choices is far, far less than what Picasso or Godard did in their careers.
By HelloMcFly 2025-06-0213:523 reply The stylistic evolution of Picasso and Godard over time is undeniable, but I think it’s also worth considering that Anderson is working in a medium that isn’t just visual, but also narrative, thematic, sonic, and performative. His evolution as an artist is not truly represented by his shifts in color palettes, framing, or editing technique, but you can see it in the emotional territory he explores, the narrative structures he experiments with. While he stays within his own unique aesthetic framework, he is pushing against the boundaries within it.
Asteroid City, for example, is doing something genuinely different, not just in tone, but in structure, layering fiction and grief in a way that feels disorienting and profound. And while his style is often imitated or parodied, nobody else is actually making movies like his with that particular blend of rigor, melancholy, humor, formality, and precision. We should celebrate having a unique voice and perspective, he's a major part of the diversity of creation, he's way outside the boiled-down average the rest of the industry pushes towards.
By sleepybrett 2025-06-0219:27 Picasso didn't have evolution so much as total overhauls at several points. It seems much harder to do this kind of evolution/revolution in film simply because of the money involved.
As a film director with such a distinct style, which makes money, it would be pretty hard to go to your investors and say 'I want to do something totally different.' and secure enough money to make a film in the modern era. There are some directors who can self fund due to windfalls in the past. I mean thinking back on noted auteurs I can only think of a film or two that are outside of their style and most are either very early in their career when maybe they were doing a work for hire or very late in their career where they had enough gravitas to get the money to try something different that they had been sitting on for many years (David Lynch's Straight Story is a bit of an odd man out though, I'm not sure of the history of that particular film)
But for someone like picasso, he can just decide on even a whim to attempt to refine or invent another style, the market probably has some kind of pull but it seems like, to me, several orders of magnitude lower stakes.
It would be interesting to find out after some film auteurs' death that they actually had done several other films in a wildly different style under whatever the director's equivalent of a pen name is. Though keeping such a thing secret would be highly improbable (too many people involved in a modern film production).
By detourdog 2025-06-0215:06 Anderson is also not dead yet so still creating.
It’s not that you’re completely wrong or anything here, but the simple counter example of other unique directors that also progressed / changed their style over time kind of disproves the idea that this is some inherent aspect of filmmaking.
And certainly I’m glad he’s making movies and I enjoy them (as I said in the initial comment.) That doesn’t mean I need to celebrate every single thing he does and refrain from film criticism.
By HelloMcFly 2025-06-0214:081 reply I think your “simple counter” might be a bit reductive. Artistic evolution can take many forms, but it doesn’t have to take every form, not every distinctive filmmaker needs to reinvent every aspect of their art to demonstrate creative growth.
My point wasn’t that Anderson should be exempt from criticism, just that his growth may register differently because of the kind of storytelling he’s committed to. The evolution in his work often plays out less in surface-level aesthetics and more in structure, emotional depth, and thematic complexity. He clearly enjoys working within a consistent visual language, but that doesn’t mean he’s artistically “stuck”. Critique is always valid, and I think it’s also worth asking whether we’re tuned into the kinds of shifts that matter most in his particular creative vocabulary.
Perhaps the example of Woody Allen at the top is more apt.
The departure in style, theme, visual approach, and structural vision between early works like Sleeper or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and later films such as Match Point is dramatic. Then again, three decades separate those movies. Anderson still has time.
By HelloMcFly 2025-06-0220:00 > Anderson still has time.
Yes, but time for what? I still resist the implication that Anderson is somehow “sitting still” artistically just because he maintains a consistent (and remarkable, and unique) aesthetic. When you engage with his work beyond the surface, there’s clear evolution in structure, tone, emotional depth, and thematic ambition. That doesn't mean everything he's done is a masterpiece, or that not liking it is somehow an invalid critique.
He may still evolve in more outwardly dramatic ways, but I think he has and continue to evolve already, just on his own terms, without compromising the visual language he clearly loves.
By iainmerrick 2025-06-0213:48 I once walked into a room in a museum and felt proud for immediately spotting and identifying a Picasso. It was only a few minutes later that I realised that the entire room was Picassos, all in wildly varying styles, most of which I was completely unfamiliar with. Picasso had range.
By kevinventullo 2025-06-0214:29 In case you haven’t seen it, “Wes Anderson Horror Trailer”: https://youtu.be/gfDIAZCwHQE?si=EzoCvqsY70AcZI4u
By detourdog 2025-06-0210:34 He definitely has a unique voice but I think he does challenge himself. Switching to stop motion certainly seems like a challenge. Admittedly he now has a stop motion style.
By southernplaces7 2025-06-0215:246 reply With Tenenbaums, Rushmore and maybe the Darjeeling Limited we had enough of the classic Anderson visual style for the films to have lovely atmosphere, but with the actors still being warm, lively and human enough to create real sympathy.
After those, his own movies have almost become caricatures of an Anderson film and the characters have become so much like clockwork that they might as well be set pieces themselves.
The one later exception I can think of, off the top of my head was Ralph Fiennes in Hotel Budapest. His character, and the actor himself in how he plays him, are just too zesty to stay wooden.
>After those, his own movies have almost become caricatures of an Anderson film and the characters have become so much like clockwork that they might as well be set pieces themselves.
I think this is a feature of his artistic refinement through the years; he's the last true visual storyteller in Hollywood. Actors don't really matter, scripts don't really matter - it's a treat for the eyes alone. Something really was lost in the transition from silent to "talkies" where the focus became entirely on plot and dialogue. If you go back and watch those films now, the very best of them had almost no dialogue or title cards. I'd liken what he is doing to something like Joyce in literature, where it's not even about the words, but their semantic structures alone. It seems that all visionary artists end up going in this direction, see Picasso in his later years of total abstraction, or Schoenberg's final works that completely abandoned tonality.
By Citizen_Lame 2025-06-0220:32 Check out Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal. First season has no dialogue.
By pram 2025-06-0216:07 IDK personally I don't think Grand Budapest feels wooden at all. The entire scene where Adrien Brody smashes the Egon Schiele-esque lesbian painting is one of the most hilarious things I've seen in a movie.
By bborud 2025-06-0216:01 Ralph Fiennes in Grand Budapest isn't just an exception. The performance, in my not so humble opinion, is quite possibly the most memorable and brilliant of any performance in a Wes Anderson movie. It is delightful.
That being said, I actually think his style of late has its place. At least he is trying something different in a time when most movies are so derivative and bum-numbingly boring that I rarely bother seeing a movie in a movie-theater. There is a rarity of interesting outliers in mainstream film today.
Outliers are good. They are not wayward miscreants that must be herded back into mediocrity lest we have to think.
It isn't like I'm a snob who only watches art films. I used to watch almost everything that hit the big screen, and I'd enjoy the whole range from hard-to-grasp, arty farty stuff most people think is boring/demanding/ugly/confusing to blatantly commercial nonsense ... that was nonetheless entertaining and fun. (I'd make my proto-hipster friends cringe with my love of B-movies). I had to empty my wallet of ticket stubs regularly so it wouldn't burst the seams.
By mzs 2025-06-0219:15 The actors being the most human-like in "Fantastic Mr. Fox" of all his films is pretty telling.
By kace91 2025-06-0220:04 For me the casual violence in this movie really destroyed it - it’s not at all super prevalent throughout the film but there are some “gory” bits played for comedy that took me fully out of the whimsical coziness I expected from it. The comedy didn’t land either.
By babyshake 2025-06-0219:20 This is clearly intentional, whether you like it or not. My mileage varies depending on my mood. Fiennes is indeed grand in Budapest.
I miss Rushmore’s plain approach. Just enough quirk, sharp acting, and visuals that back the plot instead of hogging it. Newer Anderson films look like photo shoots: pretty, but the story drags. Same story dev teams hit when designers chase pixel-perfect screens and users still wait on real features.
This is because the older films were co-written with Owen Wilson. Once they stopped collaborating, Anderson's later films are unbalanced - they have the whimsical aesthetic, but are too sweet without the bitter piercing wit and clarity of Wilson's writing to make them less cloying (IMHO).
I miss Owen Wilson.
He was going through some major depression and understandably pulled back from the industry. But he brought something very personable and authentic to comedy, and his absence has been palpable.
Many other comedians of the era were too slapstick and over the top for me. I still can't watch a Will Ferrell comedy with any interest.
By NikolaNovak 2025-06-0214:401 reply Owen Wilson has been a fascinating character with a unique yet consistent approach.
Ferrell... Massive comedic turn off for me. He seems like the guy that jumps into a room, interrupts and yells out a joke out of context, then keeps repeating it louder and louder until some polite fake laughter occurs. I feel bad about being this negative about a fellow human being, but his comedic approach sets off a Bully vibe / response in me in anything I've seen him in except Stranger Than Fiction.
By schlauerfox 2025-06-0215:571 reply "The Landlord" is a short comedy masterpiece. He's so much better restrained as a straight man/foil than a lead clown. Zoolander, Anchorman.
By NikolaNovak 2025-06-140:03 I can't see anything by thay title and Owen wilson... Any links or detail? Thx!:-)
By btown 2025-06-0216:00 I never realized Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson were college roommates, and how much they'd collaborated together! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Wilson
Rushmore is my favorite Wes Anderson film. I think you nailed it. It was a great film that was “enhanced” by Wes Anderson’s style. Newer films seem to be primarily delivery vehicles of his style, with a hint of story and plot to move it along.
By kyleblarson 2025-06-0214:38 Were you in the shit? Yes, I was in the shit.
By elif 2025-06-0214:01 Yes this. Tennenbaums and Zisou were still primarily narrative fiction which allowed the actors to really be the spotlight, which let the characters really come alive.
In Budapest, French and Asteroid it felt increasingly like the actors were too confined to fulfilling an aesthetic for them to come alive or for the actors to shine.
Apologies in advance for sounding controversially critical, I can't help but be reminded of AI art where its trying so hard to look a way that it stops being something you want to look at.
By whodidntante 2025-06-0213:57 Absolutely agree. My favorites,in order of how often I have watched them:
Fantastic Mr. Fox Rushmore Royal Tenenbaums Life Aquatic
The rest, I don't really care for, nothing new, just flash, no substance, and have stopped watching his new movies.
By billfruit 2025-06-0215:00 Moonrise Kingdom was good too, it had something at its core, not just stylish visuals.
By prettyblocks 2025-06-0215:09 Royal Tenenbaums & Rushmore have always been my favorite, the way they hit every single emotional chord without being overcooked, and with characters that are relatable.
By quadyeast 2025-06-0215:42 Bottle Rocket is a charming film
