Ethan Coen

The Tom Hanks-starring period piece Bridge of Spies is Steven Spielberg’s best and most entertaining film since…well, his last Tom Hanks-starring period piece. In the decade-plus since the delightful Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg’s made good starchy period pieces (Lincoln), dull starchy period pieces (War Horse) and a few old-school adventure pictures that still can’t shake a certain sedateness (...[Read More]

A few months ago the pared, gritty World War II tank picture Fury, led with muted intensity by Brad Pitt, caused little stir though it was a modest, hard-won victory in an old genre. It was also a far more involving trawl through war hell than the miscast, timid Unbroken. We have served countless tours through combat documents, all that history on film, it comes as a surprise then that director An...[Read More]

In scenes organized like the complimentary songs of a weary 2:00 am vinyl album, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis unfolds as another of their heartfelt, seriocomic, unsentimental, fine-brush portraits of distinctly-Jewish men at an existential dead-end (Barton Fink, A Serious Man) – this time set amidst the grey dawn of the early Sixties boom in the Greenwich Village of folk clubs, earnes...[Read More]