Joel Coen

Joel Coen has crafted perhaps one of the greatest cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s seminal tragedy, "The Tragedy of Macbeth," in the history of cinema.

The Coen brothers first started publicly discussing their idea for Hail, Caesar! over a decade ago, but the resulting film feels jauntily tossed together in a fraction of that time. In some ways that’s a good thing. The film has a loose comic energy that allows it to slip easily from lengthy sketches to plottier sequences. But it’s also lacking in coherence. The Coens seem unsure if they’re making...[Read More]

The Tom Hanks-starring period piece Bridge of Spies is Steven Spielberg’s best and most entertaining film since…well, his last Tom Hanks-starring period piece. In the decade-plus since the delightful Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg’s made good starchy period pieces (Lincoln), dull starchy period pieces (War Horse) and a few old-school adventure pictures that still can’t shake a certain sedateness (...[Read More]

A few months ago the pared, gritty World War II tank picture Fury, led with muted intensity by Brad Pitt, caused little stir though it was a modest, hard-won victory in an old genre. It was also a far more involving trawl through war hell than the miscast, timid Unbroken. We have served countless tours through combat documents, all that history on film, it comes as a surprise then that director An...[Read More]

In scenes organized like the complimentary songs of a weary 2:00 am vinyl album, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis unfolds as another of their heartfelt, seriocomic, unsentimental, fine-brush portraits of distinctly-Jewish men at an existential dead-end (Barton Fink, A Serious Man) – this time set amidst the grey dawn of the early Sixties boom in the Greenwich Village of folk clubs, earnes...[Read More]