Films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
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Miller’s Crossing (R)
“You always take the long way around to get what you want, don’t you, Tom?” asks Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) about halfway through Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers’ third feature. Tom (Gabriel Byrne), the closest thing the film has to a hero, only replies: “What did I want?” Like their leading man, the Coens tend to take the long way around, and most of the time, viewers come away from their films wondering what they wanted.
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (R)
The films of the Coen brothers are replete with dark ironies, but few rival the fact that the staunchest moralists working in Hollywood today have been so consistently labeled as cynics or dismissed as nihilists. Their impeccable new effort, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is the latest in a streak of masterpieces now over a […]
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Barton Fink: The Inferno and the Hypocrite (R)
Writer’s block is hell. You sit, every member of your body frozen, your neurons refusing to fire, your fingers refusing to type — and all the while, the awful blankness of the empty page declines to cease its sneering taunt. You lose sleep, lose sanity; your mind becomes a barren desert, a dry and weary […]
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Hail, Caesar!: Hollywood Meets the Inferno (PG-13)
The religious who live outside the film industry tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of secular materialism. In their view, directors and starlets throw lavish parties and cruise down Rodeo Drive in search of the next designer purse. Certainly Hollywood has its share of hedonism. However, it is also a deeply spiritual place. […]
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Hail, Caesar! A Tale of The Christ (PG-13)
Early in Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, protagonist Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) speaks to a room full of religious figures: a Protestant preacher, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox clergyman, and a Jewish rabbi. Mannix, a fixer for the fictional Capitol Pictures studio, explains that their biggest release of the year […]
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What Kind Of A Man Are You? (R)
Speaking of his wife and her brawny boss who is over for dinner, small town barber Ed Crane looks at the two flirting in his kitchen and remarks dryly to us, “I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes I had the feeling that she and Big Dave were a lot closer than they […]
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The Big Lebowski (R)
Part One. Glance around academia.edu and you’ll find a few articles on the Coen brothers most popular film with titles like “’This Aggression Will Not Stand’: Myth, War and Ethics in The Big Lebowski,” as well as “The Big Lebowski, ritual and (imposed) narratives of the self.” In the last three years, over a hundred […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis (R)
“Hang me, oh, hang me,” sings Llewyn Davis mournfully in the opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen’s newest film, Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s an appropriately melancholy choice, slyly setting up the film’s abundant use of gallows humor and the travails a hapless protagonist will face. Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of its struggling […]
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A Serious Man (R)
Various Christian media outlets championed True Grit as the acme of the Coen brothers work with religious material, although I think A Serious Man renders True Grit as hollow as a flintlock gun barrel. Of all the qualities the film owns which might be discussed, the passage which immediately follows the prologue is of peculiar […]
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No Country for Old Men (R)
This Best Picture of 2007 captures the bleakness of human existence with its harsh Texas landscape and pitiless villain. Llewelyn Moss finds some money, takes it, and is ruthlessly pursued by Anton Chigurh. The lines of brutality and brotherhood are hazy between them. The movie seems to promote fate and despair, but it actually has […]