The Phoenician Scheme film review: This hilarious movie is a classic Wes Anderson that's more than worth the ride

The Sun

22-05-2025

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
(15) 110mins
★★★★☆
YOU always get a quirky offering with director Wes Anderson, but there's also the fear each new film will descend into self-parody.
Still, dismiss his work too quickly and you lose the pleasure that comes from stepping into one of his beautifully imagined worlds.
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The Phoenician Scheme follows Zsa-zsa Korda (played by the always brilliant Benicio Del Toro), a wealthy and morally slippery man convinced he's on borrowed time after a series of attempted assassinations.
He turns to his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) for help.
The only problem is that Liesl is studying to become a nun, and her moral values are in constant friction with her father's shady dealings.
Elsewhere, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch and plenty more lend a hand in making this hilarious movie one of Anderson's best.
The director's world-building abilities are, as always, front and centre.
Phoenicia, the fictional setting of his film, is dazzlingly detailed, sometimes almost to a fault.
The visuals are so packed that it can feel like you're watching a series of paintings come to life.
Even the grittier environments — tunnels, construction zones — are captured with his trademark aesthetic flair.
Adding an extra dash of weirdness is Michael Cera as Bjorn, a delightfully odd insect scientist with a thick Scandinavian accent.
Cera delivers laughs and a surprising amount of heart, ranking among Anderson's most lovable side characters.
What makes The Phoenician Scheme especially engaging is the way it gently tweaks the typical Anderson formula.
There's a sense that he is having fun with his own rules, and that looseness brings some welcome freshness.
Sure, not every moment will land for everyone. There's a lot going on, and the pacing can be unconventional.
But the film shows that Anderson still knows how to evolve without losing what makes his work so wonderfully weird and unique.
The Phoenician Scheme is classic Wes Anderson — stylish, oddball, emotionally rich — and also one of his more ballsy recent projects.
It may be a lot to take in, but it's more than worth the ride.
Linda Marric
★★★☆☆
THE Lilo & Stitch craze came out of nowhere.
A couple of well-placed T-shirts in Primark a few years ago morphed into an entire generation of kids decked head to foot in blue alien-branded clothing.
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So it was inevitable a ­ Disney remake would be on the cards.
Although this CGI one has both comic and tender moments, it's ultimately a bang average retelling of the 2002 story – leaving you wondering why it was made.
Lilo and her older sister struggle to live side by side in their Hawaiian home after their parents die in a car crash. So social services come knocking.
Alien Stitch – bred by evil geniuses to wreak havoc – crash lands after escaping his planet.
Predictable mayhem ensues before it's all quickly tied up in a happy-ever-after ending.
There are some tear-jerking scenes, and just about enough laugh-out-loud moments.
And there's no bad acting, but then again CGI Stitch is often the main player on screen. B
ut while my nine-year-old daughter absolutely loved it, as a ­parent, I wished there were some sly nods to all the adults inevitably dragged along to see it.
Then everyone would have left happy.
★★☆☆☆
AFTER Mission: Impossible 7 my heart rate was so high I felt I needed beta blockers.
Now, after part two of that adrenaline-filled 2023 film, I was looking for a defibrillator as the eighth and final movie in the franchise sadly fizzles out.
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Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, it begins with a montage of flashbacks from the previous seven movies.
They go on for far too long and are meaningless to anyone who hasn't watched every single film several times.
We catch up with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his crew, including Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames) Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff), two months after the last film ended
They are all on a mission to stop Gabriel (Esai Morales) from destroying the entire world with the AI program The Entity. So far, so humourless.
And for a franchise that has always been charming and funny – as well as full of incredible action – it feels as though the script has been written by AI, too.
Cruise gives some of the good stuff in the last hour with a ­death-defying, highly skilled wing-walk battle.
But this brilliant brand really has self-destructed.