The best-looking Coen flicks
Friday, April 17, 2020 at 6:00PM 
The Coen brothers are some of the most acclaimed American directors of our days. While many celebrate their ability with witty dialogues and violent storylines, a worldview rich in irony and nihilism, parts of their cinematic genius remain a bit underrated. For instance, their works are always beautiful, carefully composed and shot, full of inspired design choices and homages to the classicism of Old Hollywood filmmaking. Few would put them in the same ballpark as contemporary directors like Luhrmann or del Toro when it comes to the consistent creation of lush visual feasts, but maybe we should reconsider that…
Hail, Caesar!, one of their most underrated pictures, is new on Netflix, offering us a grand opportunity to reevaluate the aesthetic pleasures of the Coens' cinema. Shot by Roger Deakins with an astute eye towards cinematographic techniques of yore, that comedy infused with catholic guilt is a dream of retro glamour. Mary Zophres does some of her best work, costuming the sprawling cast in outfits that evoke the artifice of the late 40s and early 50s MGM productions as well as real-life clothing from the period. As for the sets, they are a spectacle of deconstructed movie magic, gifting us with such sights as a fragmented Roman Forum and a seaside landscape that looks gloriously fake. Such an achievement earned Jess Gonchor and Nancy Haigh a surprising, but richly deserved, Oscar nomination.
All of their movies are similarly exquisite when it comes to their images. To celebrate this visual mastery, here are ten other recommendations of Coens flicks of great beauty and the places where you can find them online:
BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)
The Coens first film is a riff on noir tropes, quoting the narrative models of the genre as well as its aesthetic. DP Barry Sonnenfeld brought the chiaroscuro beauty of those classics of Old Hollywood and bathed it in contrasting neon. The result is a film that feels both specific to the 1980s and lost in time.
Available to stream on Direct TV and the Amazon Cinemax Channel. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
MILLER'S CROSSING (1990)
Gangster pictures are distilled into an arch tragedy that's as complex as it is exact. Such is the wonder of Miller's Crossing, one of the Coens' most perfect flicks and one of their most visually impressive too. While Dennis Gassner's sets and Richard Hornung's costumes reconstruct a detailed and severe vision of the Prohibition-era, it's Sonnenfeld's cinematography that elevates it to the higher echelons of the Coens' filmography. The way the woods are turned into eerie circuses of death, unmoored to time and space in their oppressive greenery, is of particular brilliance.
You can rent this film from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
BARTON FINK (1991)
The work that won the Coens a Palme d'Or marks their first feature collaboration with the one and only Roger Deakins. It's also their first direct look at Hollywood's past, with Oscar-nominated sets and costumes by the same team of Miller's Crossing. As shot by Deakins' camera, those beautiful period designs are turned into visions of Californian purgatory while a hotel's fiery corridor looks like a portal to hell.
You can rent this film from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)
Whimsical and wacky, this meta-cinematic experiment is one of the Coens' lightest and most delightful pictures. It's also one of their most robustly stylized efforts, quoting the techniques and aesthetics of Golden Age Hollywood with shameless abandon. The team of Gassner and Hornung have seldomly delivered greater work than this picture's explosion of Art Deco fantasy married to Midcentury elegance. Jennifer Jason Leigh, in particular, looks like the divine fusion between a 1930's screwball heroine and a 1950s fashion plate.
Available to stream on HBO NOW, HBO GO, Direct TV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
FARGO (1996)
Roger Deakins' greatest lensing is also one of the Coens' indisputable masterpieces. Just the way this dream team chooses to present the frozen landscapes of North Dakota is Oscar-worthy, painting surrealistic nightmares with headlights lost in nightly drives and making a parking lot look like a striking bit of ominous minimalism.
Available to stream on STARZ and Direct TV. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000)
The Coens returned to the milieu of the Great Depression with this satirical tale of Mississippi escaped convicts that references everything from the Odyssey to Preston Sturges. Their exact aesthetic demanded that Deakins used heavy digital color correction in post-production, a pioneering method at the time that allowed the filmmakers to drain the natural tableaux of their green vitality. In its dusty tones and sepia shades, the film looks like an ancient dream of cinema, both primitive and highly technological.
You can rent this film from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (2001)
To this day, this is the only full black & white picture the Coens ever directed and it's also one of Roger Deakins' most beautiful achievements. Dennis Gassner's production design and Mary Zophres' late 40s costuming help give The Man Who Wasn't There its particular aesthetic, which references the post-war noirs at the same time it adds a layer of deliberate artifice to its conventions.
You can rent this film from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)
The images of this Best Picture winner are as masterful as they are sharp. Roger Deakins' shadow games cut detailed tableaux through dark interiors, make the desert look otherworldly and a squalid bathroom into a gloomy painting of medical horror. The sets and costumes doing the subtle 80s period reconstruction shouldn't be undervalued either.
Available to stream on Hoopla and STARZ. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
TRUE GRIT (2010)
While this adaptation of Charles Portis' novel may live under the shadow of the 1969 Oscar-winning movie of the same name, the Coens' True Grit is a superior piece of cinema at every level. Zophres' costumes are rich in character detail, defining grotesque villains and anti-heroes with a single outfit. As for Jess Gonchor's sets, they're perfectly squalid, bringing a dangerous severity to the Old West and providing a beautiful canvas unto which Roger Deakins paints with light, color and shadow in the most breathtaking manner.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Direct TV, and Epix. You can also rent it from Amazon, Youtube, Google Play and others.
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)
One of the few times after 1991 that the Coens didn't use Roger Deakins as their cinematographer was this 2013 tale of miserly intransigence set in the New York of 1961. Bruno Delbonnel shot this wintry story, creating images that glow with glacial beauty, while Gonchor and Zophres do their usual, bringing quirky idiosyncrasies to impeccably researched historical designs. It's beautiful, alienating us at the same it seduces and spellbinds.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime. You can also rent it from Youtube, Google Play and others.
What's the best looking Coens film? Is it one of the productions mentioned here or other of their sterling creations like the Lubezki lensed Burn After Reading or the 60s misadventures of A Serious Man, perhaps?
Reader Comments (17)
Do not like Miller's Crossing, at all. But, as always, beautiful to look at.
I'm obsessed with Blood Simple and Fargo, and their looks are a big part of it.
And, of course, No Country is beautiful.
Inside Llewyn Davis is the best looking because Oscar Isaac is the best looking and that’s my rationality and that’s how my mind works, so yeah..
For me, it's a tie between Roger Deakins' work in The Man Who Wasn't There and Bruno Delbonnel's work in Inside Llewyn Davis.
I am taken with Coen Brothers most recent film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Bruno Delbonnel captures the grandeur of the landscapes in the first five chapters. Shots look less like photographs and more like the illustrations used to open each different segment of the film. The final tale takes place in a stagecoach that features a masterfully lit sunset. The precision and execution of light is a triumph.
There isn't a movie titled "No country is beautiful" made by the coen brothers. Only "No country for old men"
James: I'd definitely choose Scruggs over Llewyn Davis, a movie that looks both kind of ugly and like it was made...a decade...before it actually was. It's...very green? Like it was reacting to the aesthetic palette of The Matrix?
I have a copy of "Hail Caesar" and find it's 50's look simply sumptuous. A real pleasure to watch.
No love for the dude? Surely "The Big Lebowski" deserves a mention.
While I wouldn't call it the best-looking Coen Brothers film, Raising Arizona is very interesting to look at, thanks in part to then-cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld. The sequence with the five unruly babies comes to mind.
Def Fargo
Barton Fink is basically a brown movie and it's beautiful to watch. Also love the retro look of Hudsucker, the expressionist black and white of The Man Who Wasn't There and the ugly 70s look of Serious Man.
Sometimes I think I prefer McDormand in The Man Who Wasn’t There to McDormand in Fargo (both are pretty special performances and so different to each other).
Great article - I feel that the Coens’ deliberate “small-sizing” of their stories stops people from immediately appreciating how grand and stylish their pictures generally look...
There are a small number of Coen films I haven't seen, but of the rest, I think Inside Llewyn Davis has excellent cinematography - one of the outstanding such achievements of the decade for me. Delbonnel really captures the cold, and this plays a major part in how we can understand the character and situation. And Delbonnel is such a fascinating cinematographer; my first reactions to his work are often that it is over-lit (e.g. Amelie), under-lit (e.g. Darkest Hour - the look is too dark for the hour!) or over-manipulated (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). But my eye keeps going back to his films, and I always eagerly await what he does next. As with Daviau earlier this week, Delbonnel has five Oscar nominations - and he deserves to win one day.
Deakins has of course done excellent work for the Coens; I especially like O Brother, Where Art Thou? for its sense of heat; quite often, the photography I respond favourably to is conveying temperature and weather. And Fargo and No Country for Old Men are very well-shot without being too ostentatiously well-shot - so, good work again.
Yes to all of this. I am so glad you highlighted Hail, Caesar! which, as you note, is seriously underrated. But I think the best-looking Coen film is Inside Llewyn Davis. As Edward L. notes, Delbonnel captures the cold, and he understands the bleakness of winter as well.
Delbonnel's work on Llewyn Davis may be my favorite cinematography of the decade, though I also love Matthew Libatique's work for Black Swan. I am anxious to see what he does with Joel Coen's Macbeth.
Deakins had to be so close to an Oscar win for No Country and Fargo. It's incredible that he lost for both films.
jules - I suspect his chances were torpedoed when he was also nominated for
The Assassination of Jesse James. If I was a voter, that'd probably be my pick.
There Will Be Blood is a worthy winner though. That was a great category that year.
Blood Simple is my favorite. So under rated.
Small correction in an otherwise stellar piece: though the movie is called Fargo, very little of it takes place there. The location of the shot above is Minneapolis, where Jerry Lundegaard's office is.