Female Film Critics 24/375
If you threw a lasso at six 19th century Western mini-sketches and tied them together, like an old, clothbound anthology, they’d resemble Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest cinematic diversion. Superbly photographed in Colorado, New Mexico and Nebraska by Bruno Delbonnel, Carter Burwell’s beautiful score ties everything together.
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs delivers the Coen Brothers’ take on the Old West. Six distinct stories, running two hours twelve minutes total, boast six outstanding, different casts. As writers and directors, as well as editors under their usual designation of Roderick Jaynes, each story presents a Coens’ inimitable take on familiar Old West topics and themes.
Read moreThe Coen Brothers’ latest offering is complicated to say the least, unsubtle to say the most. “Suburbicon” floods blood. It
Read moreWhen Joel and Ethan Coen (“No County For Old Men’) decided to remake this iconic Western, they turned to the source: Charles Portis’s 1968 novel. Yet comparing Jeff Bridges’ irascible Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne’s is inevitable, since Wayne placed an indelible imprint on the role, winning his only Oscar in 1969 and reprising it in the 1975 sequel. That’s perhaps why the Coens focus on the character of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a fearlessly determined 14 year-old Arkansas girl who hires Federal Marshall Cogburn to track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the hired hand who killed her father.
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