True Grit – 3 Buckets

If last year’s A Serious Man was Joel and Ethan Coen’s crowning achievement in personalism, then True Grit is their crowning achievement in formalism. This is as tried and true as westerns come — an expertly crafted, old-fashioned yarn that shares Charles Portis’ source novel with the 1969 film that won John Wayne an Oscar. [...]

Burn After Reading – 1 Bucket

There are those who have never quite been on Joel and Ethan Coen’s wavelength in terms of comedy, but I’m not in that group. In fact, I’m as big a Coen Brothers fan as anybody; I even dug their critically-lambasted Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. But I flat-out didn’t get why 95 percent of the material in [...]