The Best Coen Brothers Movies, Definitively Ranked

For film nerds, they’re simply unfair, the best at every technical element of making movies. In cinematography, sound design, editing, soundtrack, screenwriting, they tower above their peers. They are masters of tone, of spatial language, of communicating story via image pregnant with meaning, of the action set piece. They cast the greatest actors and get some of their absolute best performances out of them. There is a chicken-and-egg component to many of these relationships. They don’t exactly invent Jon Polito, or Sir Roger Deakins, or Hailee Steinfeld or T Bone Burnett, or Roderick Jayne*, or Frances MacDormand, or John Goodman, or Skip Lievsay, or Holly Hunter, or John Tuturro, or Carter Burwell, or Oscar Isaac, but we never look at those people’s work the same way as we do in their work with the Coens, or love them quite as much as when they work with other people. Maybe it’s taste that allows them to locate the perfect people for these moments in time and career. Maybe it’s a symbiosis, where they find something in their collaborator or maybe their collaborator is unlocked by the brothers. It’s another unsolvable puzzle in a cold, chaotic, Godless universe.

The following is a ranking of the 21 collected films made so far by my favorite directors who ever lived (solo works included), the recent byproduct of yet another run through their incredible, near-perfect filmography. It won’t be the last. For me, and many sick neurotic people like me, it’s a body of work that contains worlds I find eminently habitable, worlds that change in meaning and shape and significance as I age along with them. They traipse through the 20th and 21st American centuries, the whole history of cinema, and selectively pluck influences and subjects to build postmodern facsimiles of, but these characters really exist alone in their own cartoon pocket universe. Which is why this last viewing experience was one of the best, by brilliant design, as if this was how these films were designed to be watched: In rapid succession, while manically taking notes, over a few weeks.

You pick up interconnected rhymes and echoes, a cinematic universe of cyclical shit you couldn’t have possibly tracked through the 80s, 90s, 2000s and 2010s in real time. A twirling top hat becomes a rolling hula hoop then a spinning hubcap. Herbert I. McDonnough becomes Ulysses Everett McGill. Barton Fink becomes Llewyn Davis. Loren Visser becomes Leonard Smalls, Anton Chigurh, Bob Dylan, a tornado heralding the end of the world. It is one great Mentaculus, a meticulously constructed, circuitous road to nowhere.

There is an unusually subjective, random quality to ranking Coen Brothers films because the quality is so high and the films often incongruent apples or oranges. This time I adhered more closely to the pleasure principle, and tended to gravitate towards the films I loved watching the most in the moment rather than respect for their ship-in-a-bottle construction. But we’re ordering perfection, quite appropriately a fool’s errand. The order very well may be entirely different on the next rewatch. For young readers and the uninitiated, what I would say is this list represents a chalk ranking of the Coen’s works from the vantage point of the middlebrow dumbass fan. It’s a good starting point for you to develop your own list with an obsessive deep dive.