The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda appoints his only daughter, a nun, as sole heir to his estate. As Korda embarks on a new enterprise, they soon become the target of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists, and determined assassins.
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45 films that influenced The Phoenician Scheme
What critics say influenced The Phoenician Scheme
…the more familial themes that dominated his early work on “The Royal Tenenbaums”…
The majority of his films center on the strengths and weaknesses of the family unit, whether family is defined by blood (e.g. The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox)…
…has been more movingly dramatized in the likes of Royal Tenenbaums, Steve Zissou, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
…lacks the heartfelt sentimentality of Anderson’s more lauded achievements such as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel…
…lacks the strength of the emotional connectedness of his earlier work such as The Royal Tenenbaums…
…his most ambitious work since “The Royal Tenenbaums,” which is my personal favorite…
…unlike previous offerings The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, nothing registers on an emotional level.
There’s less sentimentality here than in Moonrise Kingdom, less operatic grandeur than The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The Grand Budapest Hotel” was a wholesome celebration of a passing pre-war era…
…or simply by close camaraderie and companionship (e.g. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Grand Budapest Hotel)…
…such as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel…
At their best, the movies of director Wes Anderson are like Russian nesting dolls, where one narrative sits inside another and another — like with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or his Roald Dahl shorts.
Across The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and now The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson has managed to corral an almost absurd concentration of top-tier acting talent.
The one exception to this transition was Anderson’s last feature, “Asteroid City,” which reverted to the more familial themes that dominated his early work…
Then in 2023 we got the meta-cinematic jewel, Asteroid City, a film that’s about directing, but more specifically, the process of dramatising, as in, how we transpose these fantastic texts into the visual medium.
His two most recent films — 2023’s Asteroid City and 2025’s The Phoenician Scheme — have most specifically grappled with the burden of legitimacy and legacy.
…and Asteroid City was an abstract painting…
2023’s Asteroid City was a movie directly responding to those criticisms — not by dialing back on his schtick but by leaning into it.
…unlike previous offerings The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, nothing registers on an emotional level.
…a fight scene explodes with the same frenetic energy that made Fantastic Mr. Fox such a joy…
With its storyboards practically bleeding into film, The Phoenician Scheme is much more obviously suited to Anderson's stop-motion style (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs).
…the more familial themes that dominated his early work on “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
The majority of his films center on the strengths and weaknesses of the family unit, whether family is defined by blood (e.g. The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox)…
…has been more movingly dramatized in the likes of Royal Tenenbaums, Steve Zissou, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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…heavenly black-and-white sequences reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)…
Imagine The Seventh Seal meets Defending Your Life and you’re there.
They’re chilly matchbox approximations of Bergman and Tarkovsky…
A late-scene nod to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” swaps dread for hope, transforming death into an embrace instead of a void.
There’s less sentimentality here than in Moonrise Kingdom, less operatic grandeur than The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Like another emotionally serious Anderson effort, Moonrise Kingdom, The Phoenician Scheme is about searching for an authentic connection in artificial circumstances.
“The Phoenician Scheme” isn’t going to conjure tears in the way that “Moonrise Kingdom” did…
…perhaps not seen since he comically, yet sensitively, explored first love between two adolescent campers in 2012’s MOONRISE KINGDOM.
This project is in many ways his cinematic rejoinder to Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,’ a classical composition he employed so beautifully in Moonrise Kingdom.
…chugging cellos leading a full orchestra that’s more Mission: Impossible than Moonrise Kingdom…
…unlike the sprawling Asteroid City and scattershot French Dispatch, the machinations find a charming focus in the thawing between Del Toro and Threapleton.
The film before that, The French Dispatch, was an anthology of stories that sat within a framing tale.
After the dense plotting of “The French Dispatch” and the ambition of “Asteroid City,” what’s likely to throw people about “The Phoenician Scheme” is how little they’re going to care about what’s happening.
In others, no live forms get a chance to spring up in the meta-modernist air, like in The French Dispatch (2021).
With each passing project, Wes Anderson keeps finding ways to out-Wes Anderson himself, with his last two features The French Dispatch and Asteroid City in particular sacrificing traditional plot structure and contemporary human emotion in favour of increasingly meticulous craftwork and stories-within-stories delivered with deadpan expressions by endless ensembles of A-list actors.
…his last few efforts have seen him playing with the likes of anthologies (The French Dispatch), a series of shorts on Netflix adapting Roald Dahl stories, and even getting a bit meta (Asteroid City).
From Bottle Rocket to The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson made films that, despite their quirks, earnestly wrestled with themes of familial estrangement, existential loneliness, and just not fitting in.
Whether it’s the precocious overachiever Max Fisher in Rushmore or the trio of Whitman failsons in The Darjeeling Limited, the absence or neglect of parental figures directly contributes to the emotional misery of children.
…or as heartfelt as The Darjeeling Limited…
Korda is a classically negligent Anderson patriarch in the mold of Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, or the deceased father of the Whitman brothers in the Darjeeling Limited (2007).
Unburdened by the depth that has allowed earlier work like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Darjeeling Limited” to resonate for decades on end…
The Phoenician Scheme lies somewhere between The Darjeeling Limited and The French Dispatch…
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And Max Fischer’s journey in Rushmore was at once a coming-of-age story and a parable of the Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption, restoration.
It adds up to one of Anderson’s sweetest and, oddly enough, most down-to-earth films since the days of “Rushmore.”
Whether it’s the precocious overachiever Max Fisher in Rushmore or the trio of Whitman failsons in The Darjeeling Limited, the absence or neglect of parental figures directly contributes to the emotional misery of children.
Much like Rushmore (1998) protagonist Max Fischer, his ornately festooned productions and vast extracurricular activities disguise the inner turmoil…
Cera’s always had a bit of Max Fischer in him…
…the film’s own jungle-dwelling radicals, led by Sergio (Richard Ayoade), might as well be the Max Fischer Players…
Imagine The Seventh Seal meets Defending Your Life and you’re there.
Likewise the businessman’s near-death visions of a grayscale afterlife, which play like Defending Your Life (1991) as co-directed by Ingmar Bergman and Bob Clampett.