“The Phoenician Scheme,” a leaner tale which Focus Features will release May 30, is Anderson working in high comic gear. A playful and poignant kind of thriller, it stars Del Toro as the tycoon Zsa-Zsa Korda, who decides to name his daughter, a novitiate (Threapleton) heir to his dubiously accrued fortune.

Hackman died this year, aged 95, with Anderson's offbeat tale, in which he played the titular patriarch of a family of former child prodigies, one of the last he made before retiring from acting. However,