Abstract In this study, we investigate some existence results for double phase anisotropic variational problems involving critical growth. We first establish a Lions-type concentration-compactness principle and its variant at infinity for the solution space, which are our independent interests. Using these results, we obtain a nontrivial nonnegative solution to problems of generalized concave-convex type. We also obtain infinitely many solutions when the nonlinear term is symmetric. Our results are new even for the p ( ⋅ ) p\left(\cdot ) -Laplace equations.