Last updated on June 9, 2025
A film by Wes Anderson
With: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson
The story of a family and a family business.
Our rate: **
Two years after Asteroid City, Wes Anderson returns to the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival with The Phoenician Scheme, in theaters May 28. This dark fable follows Zsa-Zsa Korda, a crooked businessman, and his daughter—an austere nun whom he has designated as his sole heir—as they embark on an absurd and perilous operation that draws the ire of angry industrialists and hired killers.
While the filmmaker reunites with his loyal collaborators (Willem Dafoe, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mathieu Amalric), he also invites new faces into his universe: Benicio del Toro, striking as a haunted patriarch, and Mia Threapleton, luminous in her accuracy. Together, they form a magnetic duo at the heart of the story. Del Toro‘s character, both disturbing and vulnerable, is reminiscent of Orson Welles‘ Charles Foster Kane: the same imposing authority, the same intimate flaw.
Darker (and more successful) than The French Dispatch, The Phoeniican Scheme marks a turning point in Anderson’s filmography. Certain scenes, shot in black and white, illustrate a kind of final judgment, somewhere between satire and inner apocalypse. In an interview given after the Cannes screening, the filmmaker revealed that his next film would be “even darker.” This latest opus gives us a glimpse of what that promise might hold. The filmmaker is undergoing a transformation, without renouncing his visual signature and humor: he is reinventing himself without betraying his essence.
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