Cinematography:
Bruno DelbonnelComposer:
Carter BurwellCast:
Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Kazan, David Krumholtz, Ralph Ineson, Stephen Root, Harry Melling, Tyne Daly (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
Ranging from absurd to profound, these Western vignettes from the Coen brothers follow the adventures of outlaws and settlers on the American frontier. (Netflix)
Videos (2)
Reviews (9)
The idea of short western stories by the Coen brothers with a great cast seemed very appealing to me, but the result didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The extensive runtime and weird endings without much of a point didn’t help either. I’m not going to pretend I didn't have fun. I enjoyed some of the stories a lot, others considerably less. Anyway, I'm glad I saw the film, but it isn’t worth more than a slightly above-average score. /"First time?"/ 3*+
()
The Coens may have a lot of filmmaking years under their belt, but reviving a half-dead genre and enriching it with a short story style is a very good idea and definitely makes for good entertainment. The first two stories are absolute carnage and the best of the western genre of the last ten years, with no sparing of black-sarcastic humour and a decent dose of violence, so I think it's a great pity that the remaining four short stories are much slower (I'd skip the third and sixth altogether). The fourth one impresses with the idea, the setting and the surprising finale, and the fifth one has a slower pace, but the action-packed ending is satisfying enough including an unexpected twist. Overall, then, I'm satisfied, it's playful, absurd, gritty, funny and smart enough to keep the viewer's attention, but if the whole film had stuck to the opening two stories, we'd be talking about the best film of the year. 70%
()
I had to strain to think back to a time when the Coen brothers last spoke to me so strongly, and the best I could do was No Country for Old Men. Even the related genre film True Grit was not as complex and did not cover as many subgenres as this one does. I am most grateful that from the very beginning this was a film and not a series, as originally rumored in the media, before the creators themselves shut down such rumors. This is exactly how, in seemingly unrelated stories bound by death, two hours, and a formal reading from a book, it clearly resonates how cruel, hopeless, and infinitely romantic life in the Wild West must have been.
()
Great. It seems to me, according to the feedback from the world and the database here, that the Coens have been making films mostly for themselves and me in recent years. But why would I mind that? Every short story was something different, and each was great. There was typical humor in unpredictable situations as well as melancholy thinking about people and about life, and I certainly don't agree that the short stories didn't have points, because they did. Just maybe they weren't as evident and literal as people would have liked. Yes, I thought that the gold-digger story with Tom Waits would be the last and that it would be a beautiful ending, but then, after it ended, the next one started and then came the last one (typical Coen anecdote), and I certainly didn't mind.
()
Very weak Coens, hopefully they pick the weaker moment for the future. The stories are completely without a twist, there is only the adorable finger-shooting in the first one, the beautiful scenery in the one with the charismatic vagabond Watts, and here and there a typical Coen joke, but there are so few of them that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand of a sawmill worker. What I admire most about the Coens is the biting, caustic, ironic humour, which here is almost non-existent. Then the fifth and longest story is almost unbearable, it doesn't go anywhere, it's just such a cry into the wind and I have to repeat it again, without a single twist.
()
Ads