Rushmore — IQ Score 158/200

Wes Anderson's 1998 second feature anchored by Jason Schwartzman's debut performance as Max Fischer, a Rushmore Academy 10th-grader whose extracurricular ambition is the structural subject of the film. Bill Murray's Herman Blume began the actor's late-career indie-renaissance era.

The Anderson visual-language was already fully formed; the screenplay's emotional honesty about adolescent ambition and adult failure is what makes the property the canonical Anderson early-period entry.