#23 — Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2013) No other filmmakers thwart their characters’ ambitions and unravel their dreams with quite the same aplomb as Ethan and Joel Coen. The brothers are often lauded for their uncanny … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Three
#34 — True Grit (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2010) The primacy of language in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen makes invites speculation about the meaning of the outside authors they choose to associated themselves with through their … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Thirty-Four
There were few actors who could take full command of a film like Albert Finney. Immediately intimidating, Finney was a bull among fawns. But he was also nimble, cunning, authentic, and playful. He didn’t work all that often, yet racked … Continue reading From the Archive — Miller’s Crossing
Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015). Based on a Robert C. O’Brien science fiction novel published in the nineteen-seventies, Z for Zachariah takes a somber approach to post-apocalyptic storytelling. Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) is living alone on a farm, maintaining … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Z for Zachariah; These Wilder Years; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
It’s easy to forget now, but shortly before the release of No Country for Old Men, it appeared that Joel and Ethan Coen might have reached the end of their run as vital filmmakers. They’d delivered two critical and commercial … Continue reading From the Archive — No Country for Old Men
There’s no particular inspiration for extracting this old review from the archive today. It is one of the fairly random raids of my old writing. The only annotation I’ll offer is the retrospective conviction that Alexander Payne’s segment is strongest in the film. It’s the one that has stuck with me. The new film Paris, je t’aime brings together eighteen directors (or teams of directors) to create short films celebrating the beloved city of the title. There is no through-line, no overlap, nothing that connects the pieces together. It seems everyone was given the the freedom to construct whatever they … Continue reading From the Archive — Paris, je t’aime
Much as I’m a devoted disciple of the work of the Coen brothers, I can admit there are all sorts of forecastable reasons to expect that a new film they’ve made might not quite work. The susceptibility to recurring flaws isn’t an automatic outcome of having such clear cinematic voices, but Joel and Ethan Coen have committed themselves so thoroughly to a bleakly comic outlook tinged with ironic detachment, a quality often conveyed with self-consciously rambunctious visuals, that certain predictable troubles can easily reoccur. Most noticeably, their viewpoint can manifest as a lack of sincerity that sets a narrative slamming into a … Continue reading Now Playing: Hail, Caesar!
This is a thing I wrote a while ago that’s never been published in this space before. (I’m very ill, so the pithy retrospective commentary is truncated this week.) I doubt there was a single knowing film fan out there … Continue reading From The Archive: Burn After Reading
Of the many pleasures in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, the one that inspires the most gratitude in me is the sibling writer-directors’ ability to be sentimental about an era while steadfastly refusing to give in to undue romanticism. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2013 — Number Four
This might seem like a strange observation, but it’s a reaction I can’t quite shake: I think Inside Llewyn Davis is the gentlest film Joel and Ethan Coen have ever made. There’s a lot of aggression across the shared filmography … Continue reading But I’ve got no home, nowhere to roam, don’t even have a place to sing my songs
Coffee for Two 