Want another opinion? Check out Conrado’s thoughts on the film! Joel and Ethan Coen have, in their long career as the most interesting and probably best American-born filmmakers alive, dabbled in damn near every genre that a filmmakers in the last 30 years could possibly get away with dabbling in, but in some way it […]
My instinct to say of Hail, Caesar! that you will love it if you fall into the enormously specific niche of people who adore Studio Era Hollywood but are still totally okay with making fun of it, and also consider themselves somewhere firmly entrenched in the Leftist-Socialist-Marxist end of the spectrum but are still totally […]
Miller’s Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother’s “best” movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it’s hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most elaborate and dense movie, both […]
The thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it has a phenomenally interesting narrative structure. That sounds like a euphemism, but it really isn’t; among the many things the film is doing well, its structure is easily the most unmistakable and probably the most important. This is a story about a man in his late […]
Ordinarily, one does not use the phrases “pretty damn great” and “crushing disappointment” in close proximity in a film review – yet here comes True Grit, the fifteenth feature written and directed by everyone’s favorite Minnesotan brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen; their first honest-to-God Western in a career that has consisted of almost nothing but […]
There’s an old Jewish joke. I’m paraphrasing, heavily, but it’s a standard form that can survive a gentile like me: Ephraim spots his old friend Samuel walking down the street, and he rushes over to say hello. “Samuel, my friend!” he says, “how long it has been! How are you doing these days?” “Ah,” says […]
I’d dearly love to spring out with the ol’ contrarianism and declare Burn After Reading to be a better film than No Country for Old Men, but I really don’t believe I can defend that argument. So instead, let me just stick to the easy praise: Burn After Reading is easily the funniest film by […]
The hype was right. No Country for Old Men is basically flawless. Scrupulously adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, frequently called “minor” on the apparent grounds that it is one of the author’s easiest books to read, the film represents a roaring return for filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen to the mode of their heyday, […]
The omnibus film! That most difficult, maddening, precious attempt to gather the best and the brightest of international cinema into one place, the genre that peaked and fizzled in a roughly 3 year span in the 1960s and has never taken off since! A full year after its 2006 Cannes premiere, the United States gets […]
