After surviving yet another attempt on his life, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) makes arrangements with his estranged daughter, Liesel (Mia Threapleton), who is days away from taking her novitiate vows, to inherit his sprawling business venture should he meet an untimely demise.  He gives to her the plans that would revitalize Phoenicia, allowing the business full control over all aspects of the country including food, energy, and tourism.  To do so, however, Korda must levy his fortune make up a funding gap and to minimize risk to his fortune, he and Liesel meet with various high-powered businessmen to put up portions of their own wealth so there is minimal expenditure on behalf of Korda while he continues to reap all of the rewards. 

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is the latest massive collaboration from the eccentric writer/director, bringing together a handful of familiar faces while welcoming in and promoting many new actors to his troupe.  Returning to Cannes to premiere the film, Focus Features did not leave general audiences in the United States waiting long to get whisked away on Anderson’s latest endeavor.  The city-trotting dark comedy runs 105 minutes and is neatly broken into chapters lending the feeling almost like an anthology, but with a streak of corporate and international espionage running through it to add some narrative pressure on the father/daughter pair and uniting the zany concept under a single idea. 

After making his Andersonian debut in, and being one of the few highlights of, The French Dispatch (2021), Del Toro shoulders almost the entirety of The Phoenician Scheme to great success.  He delivers the dialogue with a gruff levelheadedness that never becomes monotonous, and while part of many of the punch lines of the film’s jokes is that nothing phases this man, Del Toro is able to time the beat perfectly in the performance without ever feeling disconnected or disenchanted. This is no doubt aided as well by frequent collaborator Barney Pilling in the edit, but that is not to take away from Del Toro’s own ability and understanding of the tone and timbre of the film.   

Del Toro’s Korda also represents a more mature protagonist within Anderson’s filmography with The Phoenician Scheme also being one of his more meditative works, too.  He expands on the themes of legacy which Asteroid City (2023) touched upon, and though Korda still has some of the playfulness about him as, say, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), his stoic nature is what prevails; a quality also seen in Bruno Delbonnel’s slowed down and more locked-down camera.  This opens the window to interpretation that this is a film which may be one of the most personal and poignant portraits of an artist at a crossroads with their own career.  From the looks of the film meticulously curated by production designer Adam Stockhausen, to the bubbly score from Alexandre Desplat, and of course the specific brand of dark humor which Anderson wields so well, there is no denying that this film came from his singular mind, but by centering it around Korda – a schemer who is reckoning with his impact after a close encounter with death – one can not help but wonder if Anderson may be feeling similarly lost.   

Still spry in his early 50’s, the auteur has been steadily at work for over 30 years, and while there is chartable growth in terms of style and ambition across his resume, these latter years have found him unfairly accused of simply returning to the same well time and time again. While The Phoenician Scheme offers aficionados of Anderson’s style plenty to enjoy, the epilogue may very well act as loving ode to what has come before and a promise of something different in the future; something that satisfies the artist on a more holistic level by simplifying the operation and focusing on the core of what matters most to him. 

Returning to the themes which the film is in more direct conversation with, Korda also calls to mind certain figures from the headlines at the intersection of business and politics.  What makes his representation here different than the lampooning of these figures as levied by Bong Joon-ho earlier this year in Mickey 17 (2025) through Mark Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall is that Korda becomes an almost sympathetic figure across the course of the narrative.  This glimmer of humanity is in no way Anderson co-signing on the antics of the unchecked, and in a timely example of art imitating life, the title expands in the wake of a very public spat between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as they hurl nonsensical insults and accusations at each other, not dissimilar as the desperate and outlandish pleading which some of Anderson’s own hot-water-found heroes have been known to engage in.  Even in the third act showdown between Korda and Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Anderson treats these men with a level of contempt relative to their willingness to exploit those around them. Instead of just pointing out the buffoonery, though, Anderson opts to turn Korda’s arc into something more akin to Ebeneezer Scrooge, swapping the ghosts of Christamses for encounters with various heavenly entities like Knave (Willem Dafoe), his defense attorney, a prophet (F. Murray Abraham), his deceased wives (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antonia Desplat, and Antonia Schröter), and ultimately, God (Bill Murray).  Anderson’s films, despite their storybook presentation, have never shied away from heavy themes, and though The Phoenician Scheme is one of the most pointed criticisms from the director to date as it goes beyond interrogating the intrapersonal relationships and sets its sights on the systems, he nevertheless strives to and succeeds in finding a silver lining showing that things do not need to be this way. 

Through this growth in storytelling, The Phoenician Scheme is still a welcoming entry in Anderson’s filmography.  It moves a mile a minute at its slowest, so the chapter markings are welcome check points for when the flow of information becomes too much at any given moment.  Further, the actual arc of the film is quite simple despite the bluster which helps keep everything more or less on track.  Beyond Del Toro, newcomer Michael Cera fills the role of Bjorn, the new tutor to Korda’s brood of sons, and the actor fills the role as if it were a seasoned Anderson alumnus.  Cera has such a command over Anderson’s ticks and tendencies that it is hard to believe this is his first time at bat, and he delivers the shining performance of the entire film as affable assistant who is thrown into this world and becomes our window into Korda’s universe. He is also one of the more direct links to the litany of fraught romantic heroes which often show up in Anderson’s stories, and he helps to mellow some of the darker themes at play in the film, never undermining them, but helping them to add some shadow to the imaginings of an artist who has been shaking the notion that his work is too twee or sentimental. Through Bjorn, like Korda, Anderson shows us that he is capable of having it all in his art – the highs and the lows, the light and the dark – and it is through making that art he is able to have it all in this life which is equally full of hills and valleys.