All 18 Movies by the Coen Brothers, Ranked

Michael Stuhlbarg stars as a university physics professor whose life is falling apart in this dark comedy. His wife is leaving him, his unemployed brother is moving in with him, and his efforts to get tenure are being sabotaged. Felicia Foster of the Charleston City Paper called it “painfully comic, rueful to its core.”

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is a six-story anthology about the Old West based on stories written by Jack London and featuring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, James Franco, Tom Waits, and Tyne Daly. Ben Sachs of the Chicago Reader said “the various stories are unified by an impressive sense of craft and a lamentable sense of smugness.”

The crime drama is about a barber (Billy Bob Thornton) in Northern California who uses the discovery of his wife’s infidelity as an opportunity for blackmail – but gets more than he bargained for. Kim Newman of Empire Magazine described the film as “a gripping, unusual and challenging work from the most consistently brilliant filmmakers of the last decade.”

Oscar Isaac plays a singer in the folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961 who finds his path to success filled with obstacles. He leaves the clubs of the Village for Chicago hoping a music executive there will give him a break. Brian Eggert of Deep Focus Review opined that the “sharply observed tale” was “filled with darkly comic and cynical observations about its period and its soulful performer.”

The first of four collaborations between George Clooney and the Coen brothers is about the journey of chain-gang escapees in 1930s Deep South searching for hidden treasure. Ads for the movie likened it to a latter-day telling of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus called the film “delightfully loopy.”