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This week at The Tryon Theatre is “The Phoenician Scheme” (2025), the newest film from director Wes Anderson, whose nearly 30-year tenure at the cinematic helm has yielded one of the most uniquely charming and highly praised bodies of work to ever grace the silver screen. 

Like the rest of his films, Anderson also wrote this most recent entry; his unique approach to storytelling is as much a hallmark as the often-discussed visual elements shared across his work. 

In every sense of the word, Anderson is an “auteur,” a term in film theory that refers to the singular and all-permeating influence that certain directors can have on their films, whose unique style binds together the disparate elements of a film’s collaborative construction. This idea contends that a director’s influence supersedes that of an actor’s performance or a writer’s narrative, and their creative vision is the dominant “style”  of the art. Wes Anderson is a prime example. 

While Anderson’s films have covered all manner of characters, settings, and plots, a unifying style has endured that marks a film as one of his oeuvre. The simplest metric for anyone gauging their prospective interest in a Wes Anderson film is their enjoyment, or lack thereof, of his previous films. In fact, for those who do enjoy his work, the specificities of the plot are irrelevant in determining their attendance; the guarantee of a well-known style, packaged in a new narrative, is all that’s needed. 

Above all else in Anderson’s style, composition is king, with every frame of his films meticulously constructed: each prop, costume, set and scene of dialogue a careful and precise assembly, complex and ornate. His films could equally exist as plays, a symmetrical and contained element always present in any staging of a scene. His style is defined by color, patterns, motifs, and a wide range of imagery employed to further enrich his maximalist conceptions. Lastly, Anderson’s sprawling casts and the unique dialogue they perform are the final shared detail that anchors his films under his umbrella. 

Every Wes Anderson film is packed to the brim with numerous famous faces, including prestigious actors from all generations, who are willing to take on a bit part or cameo for the opportunity to work with Anderson. Additionally, Anderson’s distinct dialogue, equal parts overwrought and underemoted, is an idiosyncratic throughline uniting the various nuances in individual performances. The cast of “The Phoenician Scheme” is led by Benicio Del Toro, one of Anderson’s more recent collaborators, whose intensely craggy features were made to be seen on the big screen, every expression a captivating blend of beauty and brutality. Del Toro plays a wealthy industrialist whose search for an heir leads him into a globe-trotting adventure and geopolitical conspiracy, with countless absurdities and laughs ensuing along the way.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is yet another reliably entertaining entry in Anderson’s filmography, abounding with charm and comforting quirk, and one we hope you all will share with us soon!