The Coen Brothers’ Films Ranked

Since their debut in 1984, Joel and Ethan Coen have established themselves among the most idiosyncratic and celebrated of American filmmakers. There are no outright synonyms for “Coenesque,” yet we all recognize it when we see it: a breed of films typified by dark humor, eccentricity, explorations of the central myths of American identity and iconography, perverse or dysfunctional sexuality, larger-than-life character archetypes, and romantic pursuit. As recognizable as their tropes are, their catalog is still extremely diverse. Nearly every one of the Coen brothers films could be categorized as “black comedy” to some level. Outside of that loose grouping, they’ve touched nearly every other recognizable genre with a remarkably high hit rate. Nearly all their movies are good, although they are not all great, with some less persuasive, second- or third-tier pictures filling out their oeuvre underneath the stone-cold masterpieces. Today, we’re going to take a look through that catalog and see how each film stands today.

18. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

If I were counting the duo’s solo works, then Drive Away Dolls (or Drive Away Dykes as it defiantly still refers to itself in its end credits) would take up this last spot. Since I’m sticking to their work as a pair, then Intolerable Cruelty has that honor, and it’s a credit to the pair that their worst film is the one that feels the least like a Coen brothers film and more importantly, isn’t even very bad. Intolerable Cruelty was based on a story by John Romano, Robert Ramsey, and Matthew Stone, which the Coens put their touches to when it fell into their lap. It’s a studio movie through and through, concocted to capitalize on the star power of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Clooney was by this point a firm favorite star of the Coen brothers, and this kind of romantic comedy was a safe bet for all. That’s also the problem. The Coen should be a perfect fit for this kind of throwback screwball comedy, a movie that would’ve starred Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck if it had been made in 1945. Yet there’s so little of the flair, humor, or edge that defines the Coen brothers’ work, nor the spontaneity that is the essence of good comedy. It’s a movie for hire, making it disposable and unmemorable within their catalog.

17. The Ladykillers (2004)

The next film on this list was also the very next film the duo made, their generally maligned remake of the classic black comedy The Ladykillers. Now to give them their due, remaking such a masterpiece is about as much of a poisoned chalice as you’re going to get in Hollywood—my first impression of the Coen brothers was actually as “the idiots who thought they could remake The Ladykillers“—they give it their best shot transposing the setting to the deep south and incorporating fruity comic turns from Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, and JK Simmons. It is not up to the standard of either the original nor the established benchmark of the Coens’ other movies. There’s some good bits and pieces, though it is not funny enough, feeling comparatively labored, and missing the genuine edge and sense of danger that made the original Alexander Mackendrick version so unforgettable.

16. A Serious Man (2009)

A legitimate modern masterpiece for many, a strange, slow, unfunny, and unsatisfying mess to others, A Serious Man is one I might get some pushback on for placing this low. Aside from my desire to satisfy my enduring curiosity to see what it is I’m missing, I’d rather rewatch any of the films above it on this list. A tonally plodding tale about a doormat of a professor who finds his life falling apart in the 1960s Midwest, there’s a lot about A Serious Man that feels personal to the Coens and bewildering to outsiders. It’s an oddly dreamlike experience and is an apt companion piece to a film a little later on this list, which I find a more engaging one overall. A Serious Man just doesn’t ever feel like it comes alive for me. Though I admire its unique approach, I do think it’s a rather dull affair.

15. Hail, Caesar! (2016)

An intermittently very funny film, Hail, Caesar! is similarly let down by its lack of structure and plot. It’s certainly a better love/hate letter to classic Hollywood than something like Babylon. However, it succeeds only scene by scene with a plot that’s difficult to get invested in and jokes that get less and less funny each time you hear them. There are some great performances and individual moments, and it works well enough on paper as an exploration of the romance of moviemaking and the cynical reality of the dream factory, where everything is a lie, a lie that the public has to believe or else the entire establishment crumbles. Perhaps it’s the film’s very point, that message gets so crowded out and shouted down by artifice from the Coen brothers. Nevertheless, it still makes for what feels like a shallow film burying its true profundity, and it’s a point made better by other films later on this list.

14. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

A true exercise in style, The Hudsucker Proxy is that ’40s screwball comedy born again I alluded to earlier, with terrific performances from Tim Robbins, Charles Durning, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Campbell, and Paul Newman, and dialogue so smart I half recommend watching the film at x0.5 speed to catch it all. And yet therein lies the problem. If Intolerable Cruelty has too little style, then this tale, of a company board electing a naive fool as its chairman in order to drive down share prices and buy it out, has too much. It’s funny for a while, though it does get wearying before too long, and with such broad characters, it’s not as endearing as one might have hoped. It’s an exhilarating burst of flavor followed by increasingly difficult and unrewarding chewing.

13. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

The Man Who Wasn’t There adopts a similar “absurdist trials of the 20th Century everyman” approach to A Serious Man, although with more compelling results. It benefits greatly from the truly astonishing black-and-white cinematography of Roger Deakins and the deadpan performances of its all-star cast, as well as some astute recreations of classic ’50s noir iconography, like the hilariously dark homage to Shelley Winters’ haunting death tableau in The Night of the Hunter via Jon Polito’s preposterous toupee. It feels more poignant and weightier than A Serious Man, and its antihero has more agency in the narrative. The Coen brothers again ultimately fall short as far as making this absurdism feel truly satisfying since it lacks the poetry of their very best work.

12. Burn After Reading (2008)

Stepping up a gear now, Burn After Reading is no masterpiece; it is damn funny. It’s a rare example of a true A-list cast all getting their moments to shine in this tale of two complete idiots trying to blackmail a government operative. The suave yet dim Clooney is at his klutziest best, and the rendezvous between John Malkovich’s irascible CIA drone and Brad Pitt trying to play it cool is one of the funniest scenes in the brothers’ entire filmography. The satirical commentary between the befuddled agency men trying to piece together the narrative is absolute gold, and it’s all offset by the genuine pathos that Richard Jenkins brings to his short appearances. It all works so well because the filmmakers are adept at capturing the look and feel of a high-stakes political thriller à la Michael Clayton, making it all the funnier when the characters behave so stupidly.

11. Raising Arizona (1987)

It’s a little hard to imagine quite what a departure for the Coen Brothers this must have seemed like at the time, their only film to date having been the pitch-black neo-noir Blood Simple. It’s actually quite funny how many scenes and scenarios from this feel like early impressions that would recur in No Country For Old Men. Both are set in rural Southwest United States in the 1980s: a world of trailer parks, truck stops, men in suits and cowboy hats, and dogged bounty hunters that are evil personified. It goes without saying that Raising Arizona takes a much more comic and absurdist approach, following a married couple: a well-meaning jailbird and a headstrong, emotional cop who kidnap a baby when they discover they can’t have children of their own.

The film showcases the Coen brothers’ humor at its most screwball and cartoonish, resulting in some of the most absurd imagery of their careers. It’s not as refined as their later work, possessing a freewheeling roughness, though the ambition and uniqueness of their vision are still clear as day. There’s a ton of wit and raw instability to their strange creation, and it’s fantastically performed by the cast. Cage is a particular highlight, with the film taking full advantage of his gawky, roguish charms, and the soft-spoken lone biker of the apocalypse is one of the Coens’ most inspired creations.

While it might not measure up to the best of their works, the film strikes a tough balance of wackiness and bare-faced sentimentality that’s pretty darned irresistible. It’s a sweet, cartoonish slice of Americana that pokes fun at middle America as much as it embraces its most wholesome attitudes.

10. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Arguably the best of the Coen brothers’ attempts to capture the tragedy of the ill-fated mediocre middle American male, Inside Llewyn Davis has a stronger sense of scope, motivation, and story than either A Serious Man or The Man Who Wasn’t There. It feels like a truly original creation despite fitting neatly into many struggling artist cliches. Oscar Isaac’s Llewyn Davis is not a musical genius, but he is a talented folk singer who takes himself and his art very seriously. Trying to make a living without compromising his self-worth is a daily struggle that’s grounded and relatable, with the Coens playing a subtler and more realistic tune.

The Coens have always shown a tremendous understanding of and respect for good music, and this is a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that. I may actually like the soundtrack for this more than the film itself. But that plays into the film’s story; you understand why Llewyn can’t find anything worth doing but singing in this cold and dreary world, because it’s only when he’s holding a guitar that he feels like a real person capable of relating to anyone else. It’s heartbreaking and, yes, sometimes very funny too. Llewyn’s woes are at least 50% self-inflicted, and if the stakes were higher, then this might feel like it belonged to the Red Rocket/Uncut Gems school of character studies of men who just can’t accept their limitations or own their own failures and keep digging fresh holes for themselves. Yet, as obnoxious as Llewyn is, who can’t relate to the desire to be heard, to be recognized, and to make a living doing what you love, damn the cost? That’s the real pathos of this overgrown Holden Caulfield; he’s lost and alone because he believes all the things we’re supposed to believe about artists, and every day he’s confronted with the crushing reality that his very real talents are unwanted.

9. True Grit (2010)

In some respects the Coen brothers’ most conventional film, True Grit is a straightforward take on the Western mythos, albeit one with a far darker and more poignant tone than the original that preceded it. It displays all the tropes one could hope for from a ‘gritty’ western thriller but frequently displays its harsher truths and often upsetting resonance among the cowboy derring-do. It’s fundamentally a film about a headstrong-but-naive young woman having her perception of the world complicated through her adventure out into the world to avenge her father’s murder. Or, more simply, a girl trying to work out which of her two traveling companions is the bigger asshole.

I wouldn’t say True Grit qualifies as a revisionist western, perhaps because the original was a sort of proto-revisionist western. It called the mythos of the old west into question but didn’t actually challenge it, and this film does much the same, just with a more tragicomic and reflective tone. With John Wayne, although there’s a query over his honor, you don’t doubt he’ll prove to be the archetypal hero he always was (onscreen at least). With Jeff Bridges’s much more flawed and brutal Rooster, you really wonder about his character. Damon’s a much bigger ass too as LaBeouf, mixing absurd vanity and hard-luck pathos to great effect.

The star of the show though is Steinfeld as Mattie, a fantastic creation. Though she’s headstrong, sharp-tongued, and intelligent beyond her years, she’s still a teenager and knows little of the brutality or complexity of the world she’s forcing her way into. When she inquires about the local marshalls, she chooses the reputed ‘meanest’ not the ‘best’, and that’s just what she gets in Rooster, a cantankerous, washed-up shoot-first-ask-questions-later bully who could’ve found himself on one side of the law as easily as the other. She naively believes such a man is best suited to the task of dispensing justice, and as the story plays out, that hypothesis is tested, with her going back and forth between respecting and loathing each of her companions.

Still though, the real power of True Grit comes in the deft humor of the fraternal duo’s writing and the virtuosity of their craft. Carter Burwell and Roger Deakins provide them with a fantastic score and some stunning cinematography, and the stolid construction of their story and characterization is a rock-solid foundation for the story. It moves at a ready and accessible pace and is as tense, poignant, and funny as one could hope for. It might not be an essential masterpiece of the genre, but it’s as smart, funny, and dramatic as a rote retelling could be and showcases a trio of fantastic performances. Really great from start to finish.

8. Miller’s Crossing (1990)

The Coen brothers’ languid, cryptic near-parody of the gangster genre, Miller’s Crossing, is a dense, macabre, disarmingly funny, and frequently spellbinding film noir following the moral descent of a “good” man trying to navigate a vast criminal web of his own weaving. Like The Hudsucker Proxy, it hits you in the face with an astonishing amount of bluster, relishing its prohibition-era milieu, throwing names and faces at you in dizzying fashion. When it slows down, you find yourself instinctively leaning in, and realize that for all its flim-flam, there’s a dark, broken heart at the film’s center, as it follows the painful love triangle between jaded consigliere Tom, his misty-eyed old puppy dog best friend Leo, and Verna, the cynical opportunist using Leo to keep her brother safe. Three fools doing their best to convince themselves (and sometimes each other) they have no heart to break.

Everyone is on their career-best form here, from the roles of a lifetime offered to Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Harden as hard-boiled heartless lovers to Jon Polito’s sweaty, odious middle-manager fooling himself he’s a kingpin, JE Freeman’s hard-nosed heavy, Albert Finney as the bluff mover and shaker too old school for his own good, and John Turturro might never have bettered his turn here as the gutless, unscrupulous bookie thorn in everyone’s sides. It’s a sweepingly romantic crime epic, shockingly violent and intense with tightly clipped and operatic set pieces up there with the best scenes in the Coen’s canon, yet pained, tender, and melancholy too. Among crime dramas, it’s unique for its ruminative, nostalgic, and regretful tone, less about the thrill of the act—though there’s certainly plenty of that—and more about the black mark murder and betrayal put on the human spirit. Tom acts for the sake of others and destroys his relationship to them in the process, damning himself as he tries to protect the ones he loves.

7. The Big Lebowski (1998)

While there have been quite a few attempts at neo-noir parodies, from Beat the Devil to Under the Silver Lake, this late ’90s cult classic still stands a head and shoulders above its peers. Almost a progenitor to the parodies of Edgar Wright, The Big Lebowski raises the bar for movie parodies, not usually a genre that maintains the highest standards of filmmaking. Featuring deft editing, intricate plotting, and soundtrack choices that are equally hilarious and atmospheric, The Big Lebowski is one of the best-made film noirs of all time; the fact that it’s also one of the most consistently side-splittingly funny films ever made is just a bonus.

As expected from the Coens, they assembled a magnificent ensemble cast, including Julianne Moore as a provocative feminist artist, Steve Buscemi as The Dude’s dim-witted bowling buddy, Peter Stormare as a nihilist German kidnapper-cum-porn-star, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ingratiating middle-man. For every one of these key roles, there’s also a brilliantly placed cameo from the likes of Flea, Aimee Mann, David Thewlis, Tara Reid, John Turturro, Jon Polito, Sam Elliot, and noir veteran Ben Gazzara. Every one of these performances is tremendous. Throughout, it’s Jeff Bridges’s show, giving a career-redefining role as The Dude. It’s an impeccably judged characterization, almost impossible to define; easygoing and amiable by nature, but placed in a ridiculous situation that tests the patience of a man who defines his lifestyle by limiting stressors. There’s something both admirable and enviable in The Dude’s ability to take everything in stride, remaining a superb clown throughout. The belligerent Walter seems to be the only person who really gets under his skin, and the two make a fantastic pairing. The pace and delivery of the dialogue have an effortless musicality to it, with the editing and soundtrack choices giving the film a debonair kind of clumsiness, like someone who keeps tripping over, yet always manages to style it out somehow.

Some elements, like Turturro’s appearances, may have aged a little poorly, and there’s perhaps one comedic set piece where Walter tries to shake down a teenager that doesn’t quite work. However, these are minor reservations in what is otherwise such a unique and assured cult classic that stands out even in a filmography as strong as the Coens.

6. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

A film that leapt up this ranking when I rewatched it, I had previously felt that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was somewhat less than the sum of its individually excellent parts. Watching it this time, everything kind of fell into place and its genius came into focus. A vertical slice through 150 years of Western self-mythologizing, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is both a savage point by point dissembling of the western genre and a wistful celebration of its naivety and sentimentality.

As with many Coen brothers films, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a highly musical enterprise, with songs both original and standards, and of course Carter Burwell’s fantastic score, adding a strange lyrical quality to each of the stories that is something approaching irony, yet too earnest to be that alone. “When a Cowboy trades His Spurs For Wings” is utterly ridiculous, and yet genuinely moving and a fantastic tune once you get past the absurdity of it.

Beyond and beneath its genre and cultural critique, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is in all ways a film about death. Despite its episodic nature, it’s as laser focused on one theme as any of the Coen brothers films. All but one of its stories (whether implicitly or explicitly) end with the protagonist’s death. Be it the bluff cartoony confidence of the title character, or the devastatingly hard-won hope of “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, all their tales attain a soulful poignancy because of this fact. “Meal Ticket” may be the most pessimistic moment in the Coen’s entire canon, an utterly ruthless portrait of the relentless dumbing down of American culture (a theme common throughout many of the Coen’s darkest films). Yet the sheer redemptive beauty of “All Gold Canyon” is a gentle restorative, albeit painfully undercut too. We know the next prospector will take two eggs, and the next three, and so on. The colonizer’s capacity for violence to the land is boundless.

The western genre has long been a vector for stories about loss and nostalgia, as the specific era being mythologized was already gone by the time the movie camera arose to immortalize it. All westerns have an inherent element of romanticism, even the most clear-eyed of them, reflecting on an era in which people lived in relative innocence of their place in the world, when they knew they were making history and could have a sense of optimism about that. Revisionist westerns are about the moment of disillusionment, of the European heroes coming into an awareness of the violence done to this land and its people. Though even in that cruelty, there’s an escapism, a simplicity, and reduction of priority. So many of our post-apocalyptic movies echo westerns, giving us a new frontier to reconquer.

5. Blood Simple (1984)

From here on out, I think I could make a decent argument for any of the top five to be number one. As it’s the simplest, shortest, most primitive, and rawest film, not just of those left but of any of the Coen brothers movies, I’m sliding Blood Simple in at the bottom of the top. Yet those are also all the reasons I love it so much. It’s an extremely simple modern noir with four main characters, an extremely tight and easy-to-follow plot based around confusion and misunderstandings that all arise very organically, and often without much dialogue. It’s impeccably paced and one of the most stylish films the duo have made. The brothers came up in parallel with Sam Raimi, and this is their The Evil Dead, ragged and DIY but with a clearly defined macabre vision that most directors still can’t achieve even decades into their careers. It’s brave enough to unfold at a meticulous pace, with the tension slowly building through the dynamic lighting, close-ups, and surreal touches like the barely perceptible slow-motion as a newspaper crashes into a screen door, or the gasp-worthy moment where Abby pieces together what (she thinks) has happened in Marty’s office and swoons into her bed at home. And when the climax does arrive in Abby’s cavernous new apartment, all the pieces are laid for one of the most skin-crawling and nightmarish cat and mouse showdowns in all of ’80s horror.

Blood Simple has everything you want from an early feature from a great filmmaker (or two). It’s rough enough to feel visceral and spontaneous, yet confident, precocious, and vivid enough to captivate and feel mature beyond its years. Of course, it helps that a phenomenal actor fell into their laps with four-time Oscar winner* Frances McDormand giving her breakthrough role (first choice Holly Hunter pulled out and suggested her roommate take the part), and M. Emmett Walsh makes one of the most underrated movie villains as the venal private investigator whose double cross taints the lives of the luckless protagonists. I must certainly be said that few first-time features could have such a dream team working in front of and behind the camera. Besides the Coen brothers themselves, there’s Barry Sonnenfeld as cinematographer, Carter Burwell as composer, Skip Lievsay as sound designer, all seeming very much the best in the business that they became straight out of the gate. The atmosphere the whole team pulls together never fails to get under your skin and results in what is still unquestionably one of the very best neo-noir films ever made.

*Before anyone tells me she only won Best Actress three times, she got a fourth Oscar as producer for Best Picture winner Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

4. Barton Fink (1991)

The most successful and cynical of the Coen brothers’ downright weird movies, Barton Fink is a film as disillusioned with Hollywood as Inside Llewyn Davis is with the music industry. It’s an altogether darker and stranger concoction, creating a vision of Los Angeles as a kind of purgatory or hell’s ante-chamber. Set in that period of Hollywood where celebrated East coast playwrights were being snapped up by studios and repurposed as down at heel screenwriters confined by the Hayes code and studio bottom lines, Barton Fink‘s titular character is one such idealistic intellectual. He finds Hollywood a claustrophobic cesspool of murder, deceit, and corruption. Somewhere off-screen, the last third of Babylon is taking place as Fink wrestles with writer’s block in his sweaty, peeling hotel room.

This film could be twinned with Naked Lunch as a perfect double-bill of 1991’s surrealist psychosexual horror movies about the creative process, starring Julia Davis. It also feels like a more refined and successful expression of the dark heart of Hollywood than Hail, Caesar!, exploring the unrewarding struggle towards the fulfillment of art’s social responsibility. Barton’s naive intellectual strives to speak for the common man, exemplified through John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows as a force that is chaotic, unknowable, and terrifying. I always love movies that give you a character who might literally be the devil, while also standing in for all that is hostile and disarming about humanity, and it’s another miracle of a performance from Goodman.

Like all creatives, Barton strives to give his audience something “real”, but he doesn’t truly know this abstract “real”. The closer he gets to it, the more it distresses him and defies his comprehension. In a literal sense, the box definitely has Audrey’s head in it, but it also contains the reality Barton is seeking. Charlie says of the box, “it’s not mine”, and later when asked if it’s his, Barton says “I don’t know”. No one has a monopoly on, or instant access to, that abstract “reality” Barton hopes to give to audiences, because it’s vast, terrifying, and unwieldy.

Barton Fink is the Coen brothers’ most cynical film, yet it is still a miraculous embodiment of their idealism. It’s about the importance of striving towards greatness in art, even if you can never achieve it or no one will notice if you did. Just as Llewyn Davis might have been a Bob Dylan, perhaps inside Barton there is a John Steinbeck, an Arthur Miller, or a Horton Foote crying to be heard. Just as there could be in you or I, or Joel or Ethan. Barton Fink finds the brothers at the feet of giants, wondering how they can presume to create in their shadows, pulling their hair out trying to make something brilliant, all while commercial demands—as defined by philistines and good people who depend on them—beat at their door.

Barton Fink is an expression of their own desires to make art a force for good, and an acknowledgement of their own ridiculousness. For Barton himself is a preposterous hypocrite, endlessly talking over the reality he hopes to capture, until it snaps him to attention. Perhaps though in those final moments on the beach, he finds the inner peace he needs to coexist with reality, not as it appears in the picture that hangs on his wall, but as it exists out in the world. For art is ultimately a facsimile of reality, a useful one, that can help us understand our world, or perhaps cower from it like Mayhew and his drinking. It’s no substitute for the real thing.

3. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)

No Country for Old Men was one of the first ‘serious’ movies I ever remember watching, when I was about 13 or 14. I watched it, appreciated it, mostly for its macabre focus on the meticulous methodology of the cold-blooded violence it depicted. Although I understood it was ‘doing something’ with its elliptical storytelling and anticlimactic ending, I couldn’t have really grasped what. I remember it was also the first movie I ever recommended to my Dad. It immediately became one of his all-time favorites, and we’ve made a regular habit of watching movies together ever since. So No Country for Old Men is a film that I have a long history with and have seen many, many times.

Evaluating it with the freshest eyes I can, it really is just a remarkably good film.

After stumbling upon the aftermath of a bloody confrontation on the Mexican-American border, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) absconds with the $2 million in cash left at the scene, and ruthless killers from both sides of the border on his tail. What follows is a highly methodical battle of wits between Moss, a cold-blooded hired killer gone rogue (Javier Bardem), and the aging local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones). It has the makings up a classic disposable pulp thriller and could easily have turned into the kind of grim schlock that some subsequent Cormac McCarthy adaptations have. However, in the cold, patient, and melancholy hands of the Coen brothers, who manage to drill down to the pain and confusion at the heart of the film’s title, it is transformed into a tragic tale of unanswered yearning for moral assurance. Of course, the stuff that drew me in as a teenager still grips me today. However, the stuff I didn’t understand is what gives the film its real weight. There’s a ghoulish fascination to the games of blind cat and mouse between the ruggedly determined and resourceful Moss and his sphinxlike monstrous adversary.

Like the wholesome optimism of Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson, it’s the plaintive sadness of Jones’s Sheriff that constitutes the heart of the film. As I said before, it really is remarkable how much of Raising Arizona‘s setting and iconography resurface here, given a darker texture. This really is the heir to Fargo in a lot of ways. Despite its moments of dry wit, this is a much more somber and despondent film than Fargo. I’ve heard Fargo described as “nihilistic,” and I scoffed at that as either a misuse of the word or a misunderstanding of the film. Now this… this is nihilistic. It’s Fargo plus ten-odd years of disappointment and disillusionment with mankind. Ten years of school shootings, impeachments, partisan politics, reactionary rule, terrorism, and war. Ten years, every day of them a step away from innocence and deeper into troubled confusion.

1. Fargo (1996)

On any given day, this could switch places with No Country for Old Men, and I’d be hard pressed to give a full justification for why either film doesn’t deserve that number one spot. However, I can think of a few reasons to say Fargo deserves it. For one, it may be the best example of a Coen brothers film. It’s not as out there, ridiculous, or obtuse as some of their more idiosyncratic work, yet it’s still unmistakably their own. It’s not an adaptation like their best picture winner, so it doesn’t feel half-Coens, half-Cormac McCarthy; it’s all their own wonderfully original conception. It also falls well in the camp of “oft-imitated, never bettered”. The last three decades of pop culture are replete with Fargo-wannabes, black-comic tales of incompetent criminals, hare-brained schemers, and workaday cops, none of which can hold a candle to the original, with its perfect pacing, unforgettable characters, and possibly the best score of Carter Burwell’s career.

I’d also say that where No Country for Old Men is, as the title implies, a bit of a man’s film, Fargo has more of something for everyone. I think it’s fair to say it includes one of the 20th century’s unlikeliest, most original, endearing, and credible heroines in the shape of Marge Gunderson, the antithesis of the glamorous, jaded, too-cool-for-the-rules cops who typically take center stage in such noirs. Marge is a relatable, optimistic, compassionate, reasonable, perceptive, introspective, unjudgmental but never indulgent, humorous, well-looked-after, functional woman in a stable, committed relationship and a hard-working, diligent detective. She truly is the other side to Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff from No Country for Old Men; you could easily see her turning into him as she keeps coming up against case after case like this one, seeing time and again just how callous people can be in pursuit of a dollar.

People love their “good for her” movies about badass women who choose themselves and kill off their mediocre, abusive partners, but you know what, let’s say good for Marge as well. She’s got her life good and squared away, in contrast to the men she’s hunting who keep chasing that little bit more. Her unprepossessing monologue to Grimsrud in the car is possibly the best scene the Coen brothers have ever written and feels like an uplifting clap-back to the analogous scene in the previous year’s Seven. I really do find myself thinking of Marge when I assess my own life and think about all I have to be grateful for. Some argue that her contentment is false. I don’t agree at all. I can’t find a way not to take her happiness at face value. When people kill other people for “a little bit of money,” she really doesn’t understand it, and that’s wonderful.