Every Coen Brothers’ Movie Ranked, from ‘The Big Lebowski’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ to Their Solo Projects
In 2018, the film world unknowingly received a major swan song: the last Coen Brothers movie (or, at least, the last one for a long time). That November, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Western anthology film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” released on Netflix (and, like most films released on the streamer, promptly got buried), marking the 18th feature from the Minnesota-born filmmakers.
In the years that followed, the two did something they never did across the first three decades of their career: go solo. Elder brother Joel was the first to branch out with 2021’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” an expressionist, gorgeous staging of William Shakespeare’s iconic play with Denzel Washington and Coen’s own wife Frances McDormand in the lead roles. Ethan followed shortly with the (slightly delayed, thanks to SAG and WGA strikes) “Drive-Away Dolls,” a raucous comedy co-written with his wife Tricia Cooke (an underrated constant in the duo’s career is their wife-guy natures) and styled as a lesbian-slanted version of classic Coen Brothers comedies like “The Big Lebowski” and “Raising Arizona,” with Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as the buddy duo at the center.
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With the brothers now thriving in their separate careers, is this the end of the partnership that made them famous? Thankfully not; already Ethan has teased the potential for a reunion. And thank god for that because there’s nothing like a film from the brothers together. Over the course of their long partnership, the two have hopped from genre to genre with a keen subversive streak, telling distinctly American stories like gritty Westerns, crime sagas, stoner comedies, and folk music character studies with sharply observed writing and gorgeous direction. Their films have provided cinema with some of the most indelible heroes and villains, a motley ensemble of outsiders, losers, and rejects that are alternatively lovable and terrifying. With that said, as we wait for the pair to make their triumphant reunion, we have to make do with their solo work. And that’s pretty easy, because their solo work — while not as major as their greatest films together — is still pretty damn good.
With “Drive-Away Dolls” racing into theaters February 23, IndieWire decided that now is a good occasion to take a look back at the iconic films of one of cinema’s most beloved directorial duos. For this list, we’ll be looking at both the brothers’ collaborative film work as well as the solo films they have produced. We will not be including Ethan’s documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind,” keeping the list solely focused on their fiction work. Because of the consistent excellence of their filmography, some brutal decisions needed to be made; with one or two exceptions, few of the films on this list could ever be labeled as “bad.”
But choices needed to be made, and we eventually came to a ranking that the Dude would abide by. Read on for IndieWire’s ranking of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 20 greatest films, sorted from worst to best.
With editorial contributions from Jim Hemphill, Ryan Lattanzio, Sarah Shachat, Christian Zilko, Alison Foreman, and Kate Erbland.
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