Category: Director
How Robert Altman Drove the Cinema Bus into Seventies Glory and Beyond
The musical became Nashville, the private dick, The Long Goodbye, and the psychodrama, Images. Thieves Like Us was the deglamorized gangster flick, California Split the chaotically atmospheric gambling pic. The language of American film had begun to evolve again, after a very long nap.
Battle of the Carmens – Godard’s Prénom Carmen & Saura’s Carmen (1983)
In a time laden with remakes and sequels, today’s filmmakers should take a tip from what happened in 1983, when two cinematic giants showed us how to re-imagine classic tales, and how to forge new and creative pathways into the core of our mythical parables.
Video: (some of) the Music from the Coen Brothers Films
Oh how I wish the Coen brothers chapter of Filmotomy could go on a little longer. Same time next year? Let’s salute the brothers grim…
Ranked: The Films of the Coen Brothers
Total silence, two can play at that game, pal. Remember to always put one in the brain. What’s the most you ever lost on a…
Intolerable Cruelty – an Ode to an Underrated Coen Brothers Classic
The idea of an “underrated film” is a fairly subjective notion. We all have movies we personally love that many people do not. That’s the…
And It’s a Beautiful Day: Fargo Review
As a lifelong resident of the Midwest, I’ve heard many variations of “Oh, I never thought something like that would happen around here.” I grew…
Untitled Barber Movie: The Coen Brothers in Black and White
Visionary master Roger Deakins finally won his very first Oscar recently for Best Cinematography. No, you are not reading an article first published twenty years…
O' Brother, Where Art Thou? A Coen Brothers Odyssey
I am a man of constant sorrow, I’ve seen trouble all my day I bid farewell to old Kentucky, The place where I was born…
A descent into Neil Marshall's The Descent
I made the mistake of trying to watch The Descent alone for this piece, and half hour into the film I remembered why it still…
The Coen's get Serious… Sort of – A Serious Man Review
As filmmakers the Coen Brothers have always managed to blend broad, bright comedy with the darkness of human nature. And the same is apparent here in…
A Melancholy Pursuit on the Road to Nowhere – Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
“Pursue your dream at all costs” is the opiate of the millennial age, a fraudulent battle cry that more often than not ends in defeat. And so it is for folk singer Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers’ poster boy for disillusionment.
The Case Against the “Imaginary Donny” The Big Lebowski Fan Theory
I want you to consider a scenario with me for a moment. You want to write a movie, and you have an idea. This idea…
Would That it Were So Simple – Hail Caesar! (2016)
This time around, the brothers are the Boy Scouts who prank by soaping the windows of an institution and then set fire to a bag of dog poop at the front gate. They appear to be on a lark, having some harmless fun, until a stomping-out of the flames reveals the contents of the bag.
Bringing Up Baby: How the Coen Brothers Delivered a Classic Comedy with Raising Arizona
Only the Coen’s could manage to make the tale of child snatching funny. There’s so many frankly hilarious moments in Raising Arizona, that the film…
