Joel and Ethan Coen rarely take more than year off between projects, but it’s still an event whenever there’s a new Coen Brothers movie. They’ve made some of the best films of the 1980s (Raising Arizona), 1990s (Fargo and Barton Fink), and 2000s (No Country for Old Men and the criminally under-appreciated A Serious Man). They’ve already released one masterpiece in the 2010s — Inside Llewyn Davis — and (with all due respect to the “No Dames” scene from Hail, Caesar!) they’ll try to make it two with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Originally intended as a television miniseries, Buster Scruggs was instead cobbled together into a six-part anthology movie. And unlike most anthology movies, reviews praise the film for being remarkably consistent in quality. We should expect nothing less from the guys who gave the “you’re entering a world of pain” scene. The Buster Scruggs cast is a mix of Coen Brothers regulars and newcomers, including Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Stephen Root, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits (who, between this and The Old Man and the Gun, is having a fine 2018), Zoe Kazan, and Brendan Gleeson, who plays a character named “Irishman,” of course. You can watch the second and final trailer above.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs comes out on Netflix on November 16.
