Of modern filmmakers working today, The Coen Brothers have steadfastly remained the most loyal to the moviemaking values and aesthetics of the past while still manifesting the totally up-to-date, highest standards of contemporary film production. In their unique partnership of co-writing, co-directing and co-producing their projects, Joel and Ethan Coen consistently evoke the ephemeral, the esoteric and the eccentric, embodying a mordantly dark humor, solid storytelling and deeply etched characters. Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in the Brothers’ darkest efforts, their neo-noirs. Reaching perhaps their ultimate zenith in their latest, the hardboiled adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, this self-assured pair of filmmakers had already laid the groundwork in an astonishing quartet of masterpieces: BLOOD SIMPLE, MILLER’S CROSSING, FARGO and BARTON FINK.

BLOOD SIMPLE, 1984, MGM Repertory, 99 min. Hangdog Texas bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires a corrupt and corpulent detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill Abby, his unfaithful wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz). What follows from this simple, familiar noir premise is one of the most assured moviemaking debuts from the 1980s. It’s Joel and Ethan Coen’s first feature film, and it’s a doozy, full of memorably poisonous one-liners as well as several guaranteed-to-give-goosebumps suspense setpieces. "…it's the noir-style humor, not the violence, that makes this tribute to James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock so good." – Desson Thomson, The Washington Post; "Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, BLOOD SIMPLE is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way." – Anne Hornaday, The Baltimore Sun

FARGO, 1996, MGM Repertory, 98 min. One of Joel and Ethan Coen’s most acclaimed films (they won Oscars for their screenplay and Frances McDormand got one for Best Actress). Cool, calm, collected (and pregnant!) policewoman Marge (McDormand) tracks the kidnappers of a used car salesman’s wife in North Dakota’s snow-covered wasteland. Salesman Jerry’s (William H. Macy) inept plot to get out of debt by staging the hoax unravels in gory fashion when his two bizarrely mismatched henchmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) have a falling out. That hulking Stormare’s nonchalant, bloodcurdling use of a woodchipper at the climax emerges as both chilling and hilarious testifies to the Coen’s complete mastery of tone in the filmmaking process. "…an illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought. It glimpses into the heart of man and unearths a blackly comic nature, hellishly mercurial and selfish, yet strangely innocent. If it weren't so funny, it would be unbearably disturbing." – Arnold Wayne Jones, The Dallas Observer; "A crime gem that is darkly funny even when it's chilling -- and certain to become a classic." – Peter Stack, The San Francisco Chronicle

MILLER’S CROSSING, 1990, 20th Century Fox, 115 min. Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant, atmospheric tribute to 1930s gangster melodramas is full to the brim with sarcastically venomous one-liners and a catalogue of characters worthy of any pre-WWII, James Cagney/Warner Bros. epic. Bitter Gabriel Byrne is adviser to sentimental but tough gang boss, Albert Finney, in a small Northeastern town. But their complacently corrupt burg is about to erupt in violence when nouveau-riche newcomer Jon Polito and his merciless, grim reaper of an enforcer (J. E. Freeman) make a play for the big time. There are echoes of other genres here, including Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – however, those two films, themselves, owe a huge debt to Dashiell Hammett’s gang war saga, Red Harvest. Bernardo Bertolucci had wanted to lense Hammett’s novel for years, but it never came to pass. This Coen Brothers masterpiece remains the closest in style, feeling and frissons to that, as-yet-still-unfilmed, hardboiled magnum opus. The supporting cast – including Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro -- is superb, all getting to voice some of the most-clipped, vitriolic dialogue this side of the 1950s SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. "The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups." – Richard Corliss, Time; "…a Dashiell Hammett-style jigsaw of hard-boiled argot, dame troubles and existential dread…as disturbing and densely beautiful as its opening image, a lofty forest that dwarfs the gangsters as they laugh over their kill. There is an uncompromising magic about this primeval setting, until it comes over you like a wolf's shadow that this is where the brutal truly belong." – Rita Kempley, The Washington Post