A World of Pain: The Definitive Ranking of Coen Brothers Movies
With the release of ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,’ the Coens have continued one of the most prolific, essential streaks in movie history. Where does the latest stack up?A World of Pain: The Definitive Ranking of Coen Brothers Movies
With the release of ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,’ the Coens have continued one of the most prolific, essential streaks in movie history. Where does the latest stack up?
I suspect that the Coen brothers would not regard a ranking of their films with much respect. I can picture the blank and yet ambiently displeased expression on their faces upon being told that some schmuck has thought long and hard about slotting The Man Who Wasn’t There ahead of True Grit. Nevertheless, their work compels an organized mind. For nearly 35 years, the duo from Minnesota have been making movies that celebrate and undermine genre, thumbing their noses at convention and trends, and exploring the meaninglessness of existence with the depth and absurdity worthy of the cause. Joel and Ethan Coen’s 18 films—including The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the anthology Western debuting on Netflix this week—represent one of the truly unified American accomplishments in the arts. They are responsible for virtually no dull movies—none sloppily made, none for the paycheck. Though they feature movie stars and often rely on familiar storytelling modes, they are sui generis. Each one is a low-key event for cinephiles, a well-earned snack.
So why rank them? Because their standing evolves over time. My personal list breaks apart and reconstitutes with each new movie, opening tributaries and creeks in its path. Their patterns are familiar, working with a regular stable of genius craftspeople, among them composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Jess Gonchor, and editor Roderick Jaynes (a non-person imagined by the Coens, who edit their movies themselves). Film history changes with each of their movies—self-reflexive works reinterpreting old stories and creating new formats often in the same film. You can feel a lifetime’s worth of films (and books and mythology and religion) inside their work. And they are always destroying and rebuilding their inspirations.
Given their constancy‚ it’s easy to forget that the brothers have been at it for quite some time—Buster Scruggs continues a streak across nearly four decades in which no more than three years have passed without a new Coens flick. Joel turns 64 this month and Ethan is 61—the same age as Tommy Lee Jones when he appeared, gravely, in No Country for Old Men. Hopefully there are many more films to come. But, as they say, “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you.”
The only unchanging aspect of any Coens ranking—about any perception of them, really—is the position of the infamously disliked remake of The Ladykillers: dead last. We start there.
18. The Ladykillers (2004)
I still don’t know what happened here. Tom Hanks, who was practically born to deliver the Coens’ wry, furiously odd dialogue, plays career crook Professor G.H. Dorr like Yosemite Sam gone to grad school. This remake of a 50-year-old British Alexander Mackendrick comedy has clever notes but no center. It’s one of the only—maybe the only—Coens films with no subtext. (It’s also one of the rare films from the brothers with significant parts for black actors.) Tonally, this just isn’t their milieu—though in fairness, I’m not sure black-comedy-thriller-heist is one many people could pull off. It’s the only one I never return to.
The MVP: Irma P. Hall
The Key Text: The Ladykillers (1955)
17. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
There isn’t much I remember from this, one of the Coens’ few contemporary-set stories, about a wily divorce lawyer (George Clooney) and the woman who’s one step ahead of his every move (Catherine Zeta-Jones). But that “Objection!” T-shirt, worn by Paul Adelstein’s Wrigley, is one of the funniest sight gags the brothers have ever put on screen. It’s a fitting metaphor for the whole enterprise, which feels obsessed with rat-a-tat rom-coms of the ’40s and ’50s, including Born Yesterday and the acid-tongued Hepburn-Tracy films, without saying all that much about them. Intolerable Cruelty is a series of objections lobbed back and forth between quarrelling lovers. But the Coens themselves aren’t lovers—as you’ll see from this list—even when love is the primary subject of their emotional annihilation. They’re not fighters either. They just sort of stand in the corner and make fun of everyone.
The MVP: Richard Jenkins
The Key Text: Bringing Up Baby
16. Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Funny movie. It’s aging well—one part period-piece satire, one part inside baseball, with a dash of Russian conspiracy. Were this, say, a Ron Howard movie, it would be harkened as a thrilling reinvention, a masterful ode to old Hollywood with a fondness for Busby Berkeley musicals. For the Coens it was just fine. This is the burden of success—reinvention and homage is no longer enough.
The MVP: Ralph Fiennes
The Key Text: Gold Diggers of 1933
15. True Grit (2010)
It’s notable that the Coens’ two remakes are among their least inspired works. Not that True Grit is unsuccessful—on the contrary, it stands as their biggest box office hit by a wide margin and earned 10 Oscar nominations. However, it won none, a rarity for a film with that many nods. And maybe that explains something about True Grit—it rights the wrongs of Henry Hathaway’s original, more faithfully adhering to Charles Portis’s revisionist Western, elegantly capturing the author’s crooked tongue and deft way with dialogue. It also features my single favorite line reading of any Coen brothers film. But the parts are greater than the sum.
The MVP: Hailee Steinfeld
The Key Text: Once Upon a Time in the West
14. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
Can a movie be an exceptional achievement and a failure at the same time? This somewhat troubled, rewritten, achingly zany screwball comedy has some of the Coens’ highest highs (like this bravura sequence) and also has pacing problems you almost never encounter in a Coens movie. It’s cowritten with the filmmaker Sam Raimi, who gave Joel his start working as an assistant editor on The Evil Dead, but is also notably the last time they shared a writing credit on a movie they’d directed. (It was also written many years before production began.) Three years removed from the critically acclaimed Barton Fink, you can feel the brothers reaching for something both sillier and more grand. Mission accomplished on the former, at least.
The MVP: Jennifer Jason Leigh
The Key Text: Sweet Smell of Success
13. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
A Bogart movie for Nietzsche freaks. This sumptuously photographed black-and-white potboiler slowly roils until it evaporates into a faint mist of delusion and regret. It’s probably the least rewatched great Coens film, and deserves more attention.
The MVP: Tony Shalhoub
The Key Text: In a Lonely Place
12. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Overwhelmed at the time of its release by its blockbuster soundtrack—remember when 8 million people paid money to listen to Depression-era bluegrass?—this is perhaps the most obvious of the Coens stories. Which is to say, it’s based on Homer’s greatest Greek epic and Preston Sturges movies. Closest in tone to Raising Arizona, O Brother has lost some of its resonant iconography over time. (Though George Clooney’s wide-grinned mug still haunts my dreams.) Twenty years on, it feels like a vibe more than a movie. There are worse fates.
The MVP: T Bone Burnett
The Key Text: The Odyssey
11. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
An odd duck, with purpose—these six individuated short stories comprise the Coens’ first project for Netflix and they’ve used the streaming giant’s willingness to spend on great filmmakers’ passion projects to intriguing effect. Though the concept of death unites all of the stories—and most of the Coen brothers’ work, frankly—each is a stand-alone in its own right. My favorite is a nearly wordless, man-alone fable about greed and survival featuring a dirtied, white-bearded Tom Waits. This is minor Coens, if such a thing exists, but better to have it and luxuriate in its meticulous design than to watch, say, Outlaw King.
The MVP: Tom Waits
The Key Text: Lonesome Dove
10. Burn After Reading (2008)
This movie has more to say about Russia, Trump, international conspiracy, local buffoonery, self-importance, and doxxing culture than anything you’ve read in The New York Times this week. It’s also funny.
The MVP: Brad Pitt
The Key Text: The Parallax View
9. Raising Arizona (1987)
Here’s Roger Ebert on Raising Arizona in 1987:
I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly. For every movie like True Grit (1969) that works with lines like “I was determined not to give them anything to chaff me about,” there is a Black Shield of Falworth, with lines like “Yonder lies the castle of my father.” Generally speaking, it’s best to have your characters speak in strong but unaffected English, especially when your story is set in the present. Otherwise they’ll end up distracting the hell out of everybody. That’s one of the problems with Raising Arizona.
Whoops!
The MVP: Holly Hunter
The Key Text: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
A winning film about losing. The authors of history aren’t just victorious, they’re tireless. They never stop winning, or telling about the wins. But life is filled with Llewyn Davis-es, too—self-sabotaging talents and self-regarding assholes who look for ways not to succeed for fear that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Or maybe just worried that they’ll have to hang out with winners. This is a hugely perceptive movie about the journeys that come with a life searching for artistic purpose, and the vanity of the artists. It’s easily the best of the late-period Coens, an encomium to a gorgeous moment in American musical history and a subtle entry to a lost New York. And also a takedown of that nostalgia.
The MVP: Oscar Isaac
The Key Text: Alice’s Restaurant
7. Blood Simple (1984)
As first efforts go, this one will make you rethink that screenplay you’ve been noodling with. Their work with Raimi gave the Coens (and their cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld) a sense of how to balance the ghoulishly violent with the darkly comic. But rather than the undead unleashed from hell, this story finds our monsters in the heart of Texas. It might be the best noir of the 1980s, barring Body Heat. And it set a template for the future: good guys can be killed, bad guys are even worse than you think, and the worst things happen to the most ethically ambiguous people. In a world that trembles before God, the Coens control the fates.
The MVP: M. Emmet Walsh
The Key Text: The Postman Always Rings Twice
6. Barton Fink (1991)
Barton Fink is a persuasive allegory about the rise of fascism, a compelling mock-vision of the Hollywood travails of playwright Clifford Odets, and a terrifying exploration into “the life of the mind.” But it’s also a chilling movie about what happens when you move to Los Angeles. You are alone, more isolated than you’ve ever been. When you meet a hero, they inevitably turn out to be a genius, although a completely self-destructive genius. When you make a friend, they want to eat your time, and sometimes even your life. When you try to do your work, you become consumed by your inadequacies. When you go outside, it’s so bright. It’s a helluva town. Stay a while.
The MVP: Roger Deakins
The Key Text: The Big Knife
5. No Country for Old Men (2007)
It’s a Western and a bag-of-money movie. But it’s also the best monster movie of the century, and as close to pure horror as the Coens are likely to get. Though there are routinely cataclysmic spiritual themes embedded in their movies, even the comedies, there’s something fascinating about how grounded they chose to make Cormac McCarthy’s most accessible novel. What could have been a movie about Satan—in the form of the bolt stunner–wielding Anton Chigurh— often feels more like Frankenstein or Jaws, movies about unstoppable killing machines moving through the world, tearing apart our very idea of existence. It’s haunting, in the way a car crash can be.
The MVP: Javier Bardem
The Key Text: Jaws
4. Fargo (1996)
Every community deserves a Marge Gunderson—smart, sensible, decent, and in charge. In other words, a hero. There aren’t many heroes in the Coens’ filmography. And this one isn’t wearing a cape or cowl. Fargo, like Blood Simple before it, is unvarnished—it is shot in unflashy movements, observant of details, marking patterns of speech and disquiet in rooms. But Marge, played by Joel’s wife Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning turn, is what catapulted the Coen brothers out of the respected category and into the realm of major American filmmakers. While it’s ultimately a satisfying crime thriller, with a load-bearing score from Carter Burwell, it’s a kind of movie miracle that it was nominated for Best Picture. Watching a film like this—at an impressionable age—stand beside conventional nominees like The English Patient, gave me hope and faith in awards ceremonies. It was misplaced. But love for Fargo never has been.
The MVP: Frances McDormand
The Key Text: In Cold Blood
3. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Call me tomorrow, this might be no. 1 then. Rival gangs, love triangles, shoot-outs, convoluted lingo, dames, goons, sharps, bosses, and the big blank sitting at the center of it all. This is a dense, circuitous film, with dead ends and false fronts all around. It isn’t hard to understand, per se—just difficult to fully absorb in one sitting. It demands multiple viewings, over many years. I’ve always seen Miller’s Crossing as a movie about figurative fathers and sons—Leo and Tom, Caspar and the Dane, Tom and Bernie, Caspar and his fat-faced boy. But it’s also about the way we hide love from each other—Mink, Bernie, and the Dane; Tom, Leo, and Verna. It’s an endlessly deep movie that also happens to feature a seven-minute tommy gun sequence straight out of a Cagney movie. The high and the low. Originality sitting comfortably with referentiality. In other words, a Coens classic.
The MVP: Carter Burwell
The Key Text: White Heat
2. The Big Lebowski (1998)
The best damn movie of the 1990s. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
The MVP: John Goodman
The Key Text: The Long Goodbye
1. A Serious Man (2009)
I like to rewatch the Coen brothers’ films late at night, so when I inevitably ask myself, What am I doing with my life? at their conclusion, I know I’m probably not the only person in the world asking that question. That is never more true than when I watch A Serious Man, the most hilarious apocalyptic prophecy or the scariest comedy ever made. It’s a little hard to know which one the Coens are angling after, if it isn’t both at the same time.
A Serious Man has always been regarded as the Coens’ most autobiographical film, set in their native Minnesota in 1967, even if it opens with a prologue about a Jewish demonic spirit in 19th century Eastern Europe and ends with the most horrifying final shot of the century. But the personal is polemical in this movie, a mortal testament to what religion, science, and practicality cannot provide us with. In a blackened, empty universe, sometimes there’s no point in shouting about getting stuck with Santana, Abraxas. Just accept it.
The MVP: Michael Stuhlbarg
The Key Text: The Old Testament
