Ethan and Joel Coen

Equally at home in mainstream and independent cinema, in latterday film noir as well as comedy, The Coen Brothers are unique in the annals of modern movie-making. For the critic, they present an exquisite problem as, in films such as Barton Fink they mock the pretensions of art and load their films with red herrings and deceptively empty motifs, such as the hat in Millers Crossing. Yet despite the disingenuous tone of their interviews, the Coens are clearly masters of the cinematic craft and schooled in film history, as countless allusions in their movies attest.

In this Cahiers Du Cinema edition Ian Nathan guides us through their ouevre, their successes and their occasional failures (though no one made more interesting failures than The Coens), from the low-budget beginnings of Blood Simple to their greatest hit to date, the relatively “straight” True Grit