Best to Worst: Ranking Coen Brothers Movies
In our series Best to Worst we look at rankings of popular entertainment products from a single creator. Our focus is on how critics have ranked an artist’s entire body of work. Ranking Coen Brothers Movies looks at the how critics rank the 18 major films of the Coen Brothers released between 1984 and 2018..
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About Our Rankings
The COVID-19 quarantine has forced us to stay at home. To keep sanity, this has been a perfect time to watch television shows, movies, play games and listen to music.
Best of lists are extremely popular so we have started our own. To make our best of lists different we are actually curating best of lists from other critics to come up with the Best of the Best.
Many best of lists rely on reader polls/crowd ranking or critic ranking sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. This is a fine general indicator, but it does not consider an artist’s entire body of work. Reader polls tend to be popularity contests while critic ranking sites like Metacritic measure reaction at the time a work is released.
Our goal is to look through multiple lists where a person or entity has taken the time to go through an artist’s entire body of work and make their own judgment and create a list of best to worst.
See more details in our methodology section at the bottom.
The Coen Brothers
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen are together known as the Coen Brothers. Together they have written, directed and produced a series of films that consistently receive top marks from bpth critics and viewers.
The Coen Brothers make some of the most unique films in Hollywood. They released their first movie in 1984 with Blood Simple. I first became aware of them with the 1987 release of Raising Arizona.
Between 1984 and 2018, the Coen Brothers have released 18 films. The latest was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs released on Netflix in late 2018.
Best to Worst Ranking Coen Brothers Movies
Coen Brothers Movies Ranked Best to Worst
| Movie | Score | High | Low | Difference | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Country For Old Men | 82 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2007 |
| Fargo | 82 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 1996 |
| The Big Lebowski | 78 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 1998 |
| Blood Simple | 66 | 3 | 10 | 7 | 1984 |
| A Serious Man | 66 | 1 | 10 | 9 | 2009 |
| Miller's Crossing | 65 | 3 | 9 | 6 | 1990 |
| Barton Fink | 61 | 5 | 9 | 4 | 1991 |
| Raising Arizona | 60 | 2 | 11 | 9 | 1987 |
| Inside Llewyn Davis | 47 | 8 | 12 | 4 | 2013 |
| The Man Who Wasn't There | 44 | 4 | 13 | 9 | 2001 |
| The Hudsucker Proxy | 37 | 5 | 16 | 11 | 1994 |
| Burn After Reading | 34 | 10 | 17 | 7 | 2008 |
| O Brother, Where Art Thou? | 33 | 6 | 15 | 9 | 2000 |
| The Ballad of Buster Scruggs | 30 | 10 | 16 | 6 | 2018 |
| True Grit | 26 | 13 | 15 | 2 | 2010 |
| Hail, Caesar! | 23 | 9 | 17 | 8 | 2016 |
| Intolerable Cruelty | 13 | 12 | 18 | 6 | 2003 |
| The Ladykillers | 8 | 17 | 18 | 1 | 2004 |
Our Opinion
I have seen 15 out of 18 Coen Brothers movies. The ones I have not seen are The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty and The Man Who Wasn’t There. The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty clearly stood out as the worst movies so it appears I am not missing much.
The Coen Brothers work is of extremely high-quality and trying to pick the best is difficult. The rankings clearly confirm this view. No Country for Old Men, Fargo and The Big Lebowski are near the top on almost every list. Beyond those three there is much more diversity of opinion.
Coen Brothers movies are definitely not for children. They feature dark humor and intense themes. Many movies have random violence that can be disconcerting to viewers.
Personally, I have enjoyed many of the movies towards the bottom of the list. Hail, Caesar and The Hudsucker Proxy are comparatively light comedies that are a lot of fun. Burn After Reading is in a similar vein but a little darker.
Trying to roughly divide Coen Brothers movies I think they split between the dark comedy that started with Raising Arizona and the more dark drama of their first movie Blood Simple.
Critics appear to prefer the darker drama. Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo and No Country for Old Men all fall into the category of dark drama. Among the more comic movies only The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona are near the top.
There are also Coen Brothers movie that can be seen as more character studies. This would include The Big Lebowski, Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man and the western remake True Grit. True Grit is probably the most commercial Coen Brothers movie, but critics were almost unanimous ranking it towards the bottom. Personally, I really enjoyed it.
Recommendations
My recommendation for newcomers to the Coen Brothers is start with Fargo on the drama side and Raising Arizona for black comedy. If you like Fargo you go on to No Country for Old Men, Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple. From Raising Arizona next movies to watch include O Brother, Where Art Thou, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy and Hail, Caeser!
The Big Lebowski is a classic movie that has its own fan base. This movie is full of inside jokes and references to other Coen Brothers movies. In my mind it is a film that needs to be seen several times to catch all the references. The Big Lebowski works best for established Coen fans.
It speaks volumes that I have not only seen most Coen movies, but I have seen most of them at least twice. These are movies that reward repeated views and in-depth analysis.
Even though it gets low reviews I am still looking forward to watching The Ladykillers. This is a remake of a classic 1950s Alec Guiness movie that also included Peter Sellers. We have the Alec Guiness boxset that includes The Ladykillers. Guiness is best known for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.
Methodology
The goal is to pick 5 to 10 lists of Best to Worst of a given series of films, books, music or games. The requirement for these lists is that they are based on reviewers who have considered the entire body of work as a whole and drawing comparisons. Lists that are reader polls or aggregate reviews from sites like Metacritic are NOT considered.
Each item on a list is scored based on how it ranks with 1 point being assigned to the worst product, 2 to the next worst and so on. In a list of 10 items the top product would receive 10 points, the second-best product 9 points continuing to the worst product which would get 1 point.
The scores for all lists are combined. So, if there were 5 lists with 10 items each, the maximum score would be 50 (5 lists ranking the item as number 1 for 10 points each). The minimum score would be 5 (5 lists ranking the item as number 10 for 1 point each).
We also factor in the spread of the ranking. This indicates how much consensus there is around a item. If all lists tend to rank a certain item near the top or bottom there is a great deal of consensus. If some lists have an item near the top, while others have it one the bottom, obviously there is a difference of opinion.
The Lists
We looked at several best of lists that were released before The Ballad of Buster Scruggs came out in 2018. However, we only included lists that had The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. We can say that if we had included those older lists the rankings would not have changed a great deal. The biggest change would likely have been Raising Arizona moving up several spots and Miller’s Crossing dropping a few spots.
Included lists:
Older lists that were not included:
- Business Insider
- Uproxx
- Vulture
- GQ
- Taste of Cinema
- Cinema Blend
