The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: The Babadook, Birdman, Whiplash

The cinema of Wes Anderson is the cinema of joy. Vivid, colourful, and almost mathematically composited, Anderson's films are instantly definable and his aesthetic impulses have cemented him as one of the great visual storytellers of the last two decades.

At the same time, that visual rigidity has led to the occasional underestimation of Anderson's talents. There's still a broad want to label his films as "quirky", and surface-level critiques like these are at least partially responsible for all the embarrassing AI gremlins who've been churning out "Andersonised" versions of popular IP to pollute the internet with over the last several years. To them, he's all quirk, when the truth is obviously very different.

Anderson's cinema is a visual delight, but it's also raw, emotional, and frequently devastating. It can also prove unfortunately prophetic, as was the case with 2014's anti-fascist tragedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Picturesque and comforting like so many of Anderson's works, and just as crushing when it wants to be, Budapest dwells on themes of expression, pleasure, and non-conformity in a 1930s European country on the cusp of a Nazi-style takeover. Anderson's usual players are along for the ride, including the likes of Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe, but the chorus is complemented this time by Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori - the former as the flirtatious yet professional hotel concierge of the Grand Budapest, Gustave, and the latter as a young refugee-turned-bellhop, Zero.

Anderson brings these various ingredients together to create possibly his finest ever dish - a darkly comic yet whimsical tale that grows ever more bittersweet with each passing year.