The Essentials: The Coen Brothers Films Ranked

10. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000)
Probably tied with “Raising Arizona” as the Coens’ silliest, most slapsticky entry in their filmography, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” was also their most musical film prior to “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Arguably best-remembered for its T-Bone Burnett-curated soundtrack of “good old-timey music” from Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, The Whites and Allison Krauss, the film is packed, perhaps overstuffed, with, well, everything: a yodeling John Turturro, a KKK lynch mob, a trio of sirens, a flash flood, Baby Face Nelson and mountains of Dapper Dan pomade — all amid a Depression-era retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey.” George Clooney stars as Ulysses Everett McGill, an escaped convict accompanied in his quest by fellow prisoners Pete (Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). Clooney wasn’t quite the A-lister he is now, but his first work with the fraternal filmmakers allowed him to be goofier than audiences had seen him be. He gamely lip-syncs along with Dan Tyminski’s vocals, obsesses over his hair and pontificates about subjects he pretends to be knowledgeable about. Clooney is a highlight, but we obsess over Roger Deakins’ dusty, gold-tinged cinematography (which helped popularize digital color-correction grading, as one of the first films to use that technique) and the weirdly wonderful script that gives supporting cast members like John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Charles Durning and Stephen Root plenty to play with. It’s an odd but strangely accessible film that can feel episodic at times, but we still laugh and marvel more than a decade later.

9. “The Big Lebowski” (1998)
Now as much cult as actual movie (it even has an annual festival devoted to it, not something that every low-grossing movie from 1998 can boast), “The Big Lebowski” was greeted with puzzlement by many on its release: After the mainstream breakthrough of “Fargo,” here was a movie that mashed up the Western, Busby Berkeley, the stoner comedy and Raymond Chandler into something utterly distinctive, as Jeff Bridges’ titular Dude becomes embroiled in a fiendishly convoluted plot involving a kidnapping, nihilists, pornography and performance art, with his bowling buddies (John Goodman and Steve Buscemi) brought along for the ride. On paper, it’s the kind of post-Tarantino quirky crime picture that became increasingly common, and increasingly unbearable, throughout the 1990s. But in practice, it’s a near-effortless delight, brushing against preciousness but steering clear, carving out a very particular tone and feel, and somehow never frustrating despite its absolute aversion to traditional narrative pay-off. They might have made more soulful films, but this is probably still their funniest, or at least their most quotable, and probably even more than “Fargo” helped move them into the general consciousness, Saddam Hussein dream sequences, marmots in the bath and all.

8. “No Country For Old Men” (2007)
After the one-two punch of “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers,” the news that the Coens were making their first-ever adaptation could have come as a sign that they were slipping entirely into the Hollywood mainstream — a job for hire, and for superproducer Scott Rudin no less. Instead, it was the film that won them three Oscars each, a bleak and beautiful instant crime classic of rare substance, one that combined their voice with that Cormac McCarthy’s and came out with something new and terrifying. Set in 1980s Texas, and following the fall-out after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) takes a briefcase full of money from a botched drug deal, focusing in particular the almost Satanic killer pursuing him, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, memorably bowl-cut). It was a film of new maturity for the Coens, McCarthy bringing out a soulfulness and poetry and affinity for their landscape that had somehow been dormant while letting their flair for texture and character and wit come to the forefront, feeling utterly of a piece among their other movies (you can draw a straight line from “Raising Arizona” all the way through to this). It might be their bleakest movie, but few could say, in the decade since, that its apocalyptic feel hasn’t become more and more prescient over time.

7. ”The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001)
One of the more frequently overlooked Coens gems, possibly because of its glum tone and black-and-white cinematography (which reaches an almost velveteen level of richness), “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is also one of the filmmakers’ most essential works, a portrait of a man existentially adrift that also includes a number of references to UFOs, a scheme involving dry cleaning, a murder/blackmail plot and the electric chair. Billy Bob Thornton plays a barber in the late ’40s who suspects his wife (Frances McDormand, of course) is cheating on him with her boss (James Gandolfini). At the same time, a mystery man comes to him with a unique business proposal for a new process called “dry cleaning,” so Thornton decides to blackmail Gandolfini for the money, threatening to expose his philandering ways. Of course things go wrong — murderously wrong. The Coens were inspired by the work of novelist James M. Cain, who wrote “Double Indemnity” and is one of the hardboiled crime masters that would inspire film noir. But of course, this being a Coens movie, it’s not a straight-ahead film noir, but one that uses the tropes for an altogether weirder, more cosmic end. “The Man Who Wasn’t There” still feels relatively undiscovered, like a giant dinosaur skeleton sitting just below a popular fast food restaurant. But hopefully, its time will come, and soon. It’s one of the brothers’ very best films, and one of their oddest (also look for an early Scarlett Johansson performance in a role too good to give away).

6. “Miller’s Crossing” (1990)
With “Miller’s Crossing,” the Coens set out to create a straight-up crime movie, and they succeeded brilliantly. Gabriel Byrne plays a low-level operative caught in a gang war in an unidentified city (they shot it in New Orleans, attracted by its historically intact architecture), as well as a love triangle between a big-shot mobster (Albert Finney) and his moll (Marcia Gay Harden). The plot is too knotty to try to untangle in a brief synopsis, but the movie thrusts forward in a nearly galvanic way, with images, like the opening shot of a black hat gliding through a forest clearing (one used for executions, we’ll later learn); and, later, Albert Finney assaulting a house with a tommy gun, cigar dangling precariously from the corner of his mouth, searing themselves into your brain. Byrne is the perfect Coens antihero: cool, calculating, and more than a little bit of a son-of-a-bitch; he’s the kind of guy who you can imagine making all of the connections and then following through on them. “Miller’s Crossing” was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, who would go on to have a successful career as a director himself, helming the three “Men in Black” movies (among other things); his love of extreme camera angles and the widest possible lens available helps give the film its teetering energy. It’s a gangster epic, alright, but one more-than-slightly unhinged in that perfectly agreeable Coens way.