Though admittedly macabre, each attempt — think plane crashes, elevator ambushes, and even death by quicksand — features trademark Andersonian humor and comical loopholes to Korda's safety, that, gruesome or not, can't help but make one smile.

T here's an earnest thread of hope in Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, despite its anti-hero being a monument of corruption. Like many of Anderson's movies (The Royal Tenenba

I seldom laughed but often smiled during “The Phoenician Scheme,” another monument to artifice from modern cinema’s fussiest auteur.