The Coen Brothers Movies Ranked Worst To Best

There's only one film in the bunch that feels like an unmitigated disaster: 2004's "The Ladykillers." This remake of the '50s British comedy of the same name transposes the film's action of a band of dim-witted crooks trying to hoodwink an old lady to the American South. The broader studio comedy trappings really don't suit the Coen Brothers, though no one can say they — or Tom Hanks, with his thick Foghorn Leghorn accent and Colonel Sanders get-up as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph.D. — are not swinging for the fences. They can never quite figure out the chemistry between Hanks and the odd mixture of characters assembled for the task ahead, which includes Marlon Wayans' janitor Gawain, J.K. Simmons' explosives expert Garth, and Tzi Ma's tunneling whiz known only as "The General."

Thankfully, the Coens would get better at remakes and retreads in time. But "The Ladykillers" just feels like it can never quite escape that odd match of concept and artist. At least we'll always have the Ealing original.

It's clear the Coens sought a contemporary take on the classical Hollywood screwball comedy with "Intolerable Cruelty." Indeed, there are the seeds of something really special in the sparks that fly between George Clooney's divorce attorney Miles Massey and Catherine Zeta-Jones' gold-digging Marilyn Rexroth. But despite two very game participants in this old-school battle of the sexes matchup, something doesn't quite gel here.

The comedy feels a bit miscalibrated by the Coens, whose penchant for the occasional zany outburst disrupts the more refined laughs. Clooney is a master of self-deprecating humor that undercuts his suave demeanor, but he can never reconcile the cartoonish antics the script forces him to engage in with the more buttoned-up nature of his character. The film's many wild supporting characters, ranging from Cedric the Entertainer as a "gotcha!" game show host to Billy Bob Thornton as an oil baron, all feel a bit like they're from different (if entertaining) movies. Though not a total write-off, "Intolerable Cruelty" feels like a missed opportunity for something more. The parts are there, but they don't cohere into something greater like most Coens works do.

"I'm talkin' about ethics," begins Jon Polito's Johnny Caspar in "Miller's Crossing." In case anyone missed the memo, the Coens announce themselves as capital-S "Serious" filmmakers with their third directorial venture. Their not-so-Roaring Twenties chronicle of organized crime is handsomely mounted, sure, but it's also a bit pompously ponderous. As Gabriel Byrne's Tom Reagan plays both sides of a dispute between rival ethnic gangs against each other, the Coen Brothers have a tendency to blare their themes as tensions blaze. While the filmmakers normally find a way to organically smuggle their idiosyncrasies into a film, they make themselves all too present here through grandiose choices in many self-consciously stylized sequences. It's perfectly fine as a mob movie and by no means a disaster, but the Coens' heavy-handedness appears and distracts when it reaches for something bigger than just the genre.

With time, they got better at weaving those idiosyncracies more intricately into the texture of their yarns, such that a declarative streak would no longer be necessary. In later Coen works, the meanings of the stories speak for themselves. In "Miller's Crossing," the characters speak the meaning of the story.

Talk about whiplash after "No Country for Old Men" — within a year of their best picture-winning triumph, the Coens were back with the bonkers "Burn After Reading." This espionage caper gets many stars at their absolutely loopiest: George Clooney once again sending up his debonair aura as a bumbling oaf, Brad Pitt playing a self-assured doofus, Frances McDormand undercutting her traditionally stern persona as an earnest but hapless gym employee obsessed with trying to alter her looks through plastic surgery. Each becomes ensnared in the intrigue around the memoirs of John Malkovich's Osbourne Cox, an embittered ex-CIA analyst felled not by intelligent people but by fools.

This is a ridiculous comedy about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things. It's both fitting and a bit frustrating that the Coens use this as a vehicle for what might be the most nihilistic read of people in their entire body of work. In recent years, the film's justified shrug of an ending, which depicts governmental and societal failure to learn anything from a compounding set of mistakes has become something of an Internet meme. If only the Coens' incisive understanding of humanity proved wrong here ... but they rarely miss. The relevance of "Burn After Reading" will likely only increase before it ever begins to fade.

The legacy of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" as a film may now be dwarfed by the smashing success of its soundtrack, a collection of country and bluegrass tunes that won the Grammy Award for album of the year. The movie is more than just a collection of scenes that provide an excuse for an album, though. The Coens make music an integral part of their film, a Depression-era adaptation of Homer's "The Odyssey" ... never mind that the filmmakers say they never actually read the epic poem, a painfully on-brand admission that blurs the lines between reality and mythology just as they do on-screen.

For those who did pay attention in high school English class, however, the hijinks of three chain gang escapees on a hunt for treasure present any number of analogs to the classic text for spotting. The cyclops becomes a one-eyed crook with ties to the KKK; the sirens become enticing women washing clothes in a river. The noble journey home is a little bit more open to interpretation because, in classic Coens form, there are few true and incorruptible heroes. For everyone else less familiar with the text, however, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is just a fun movie that's easy on the eyes as it is on the ears.

"The Tragedy of Macbeth," the first film directed by one Coen brother without the other's involvement, makes its biggest change to the Shakespearean text through the simplest of decisions: casting. By having sexagenarian thespians Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, parts traditionally played by performers several decades their junior, the entire nature of the characters' relationship to power shifts. Rather than a cautionary tale about the corrosive pursuit of ambition at all costs, the focus becomes on the weariness of a couple who grasp for power as their window of opportunity to seize it shrinks. Just that animating presence alone unlocks new avenues of understanding within a play that's been performed and parsed for centuries.

Joel Coen grants audiences the rarest of gifts, that feeling of hearing Shakespearean dialogue as if for the first time, and he matches this intellectual sensation with a visual one through expressionistic cinematography and set design. If you get lost in the old English verse, the evocative visuals that underscore and undercut the dialogue will ensure it's impossible to miss an emotional beat. No Ethan, no problem for "The Tragedy of Macbeth."

If there's any film among the Coens' work ripe for reevaluation and reclamation, it's "Hail, Caesar!" This story of studio boss and fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is pitched somewhere between their dominant modes of highly literate genre play, ironic comedy, and bitter moral drama — yet remains somewhat elusive to viewers given how it slides slipperily between these styles. That nebulous quality is precisely what makes the film such a shape-shifting delight. It's a tribute to the possibility, not so much the history, of cinema.

The Mannix character allows the film to toggle between different film sets on the studio lot, providing a glimpse into any number of styles ranging from Biblical epics starring George Clooney's gullible Baird Whitlock to Gene Kelly-like musical numbers featuring Channing Tatum's Burt Gurney. And, with regards to their outright comedic work, the funniest sequence in any Coens movie is easily the futile attempt of Alden Ehrenreich's Hobie Doyle to deliver the line "would that it were so simple" to the satisfaction of Ralph Fiennes' uptight director Laurence Laurentz. With each stop he makes to check in on his stable of stars, the Coens makes clear the business — and coercion — necessary for movie magic that is always lurking just outside the frame.

The Coens are not exactly personal filmmakers, but they pull persuasively and potently from their own backgrounds in "A Serious Man." The level of detail as they recreate their foundational milieu of a midwestern suburban Jewish community is remarkable, even by their own exacting standards. The brothers wrestle openly here with the religious undercurrent flowing underneath their work through a retelling of the book of Job. Woebegone math professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) tries to be a good and upright person and yet still finds his life little more than a parade of misery. When he tries to engage spiritual leaders to explain the tragedy, they offer little more than platitudes and parables. And while these misadventures bring him pain, the dark humor cannot help but tickle the audience observing his struggles from afar. The brothers are no strangers to deploying music in their films to great effect, and here it's Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" that speaks the movie's message better than any scripture: "When the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don't you want somebody to love?"

The Coens earn their shrug at the eternal question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" — they're simply parroting back the inexplicable nature of divine justice provided by their faith tradition. "A Serious Man" refuses the easy path of embracing or condemning Judaism or religion at large in favor of issuing an open-ended question to an unanswerable dilemma. The Coens provide a clear-eyed look at what religion can and cannot offer humans in our time of need.

Nowhere do the Coens navigate the complexities of humanity with more depth and insight than in "Fargo." This film shows people resorting to grisly violence when backed into a corner, yet it also depicts people holding onto hope after seeing those base impulses play out. Is violence our innate state? Is optimism naive? Perhaps all can be true, they suggest, depending on whose vantage point you look through.

The film can hold the lived experiences and values of crooked car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) as he digs a deeper and deeper hole trying to extort his father-in-law, two contract criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) reluctantly willing to do his dirty work, and pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) trying to make sense of the senseless. The film constantly swerves in unexpected directions — heck, Marge Gunderson doesn't even show up until midway through — without ever feeling disjointed. It's rare to see any movie convincingly span the range of humor of "Minnesota nice" to the horror of blood splayed across white snow to impromptu moralizing about the value of human life without ringing a false note.

As shown by the broad range of their filmography, it's questionable whether there can even be such thing as a "Coen Brothers movie." Even still, it does seem a bit weird to select "No Country for Old Men" as the filmmakers' best effort given that it manages to feel like an outlier amidst a body of work already full of them. This brutally effective thriller about a man on the run (Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss) from a relentless villain who epitomizes unflinching evil (Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh) taps into something elemental, rather than merely incidental, about fate and decisions. One step behind Chigurh's dogged pursuit of Moss is Tommy Lee Jones as the aging sheriff Ed Tom Bell, trying his best to parse a case that feels as if it portends an age of lawlessness triumphing which he is unable to stop.

This plaintive adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's tricky prose stylings effectively translates his sparseness for the screen. With few words, McCarthy can conjure a struggle that is larger than life, and the Coens find a cinematic language to invoke a similar sensation. The normally noisy Coen Brothers go quite silent in "No Country for Old Men," dwelling in between the valleys of large events to wring an unbearable tension from them. The uncharacteristic minimalism for the Coens leads to maximum impact — a note-perfect film that lingers in the mind forever.