Hail, Caesar!

I was toying with the idea of structuring this review around my reading of ‘Hail, Caesar’ as ‘Barton Fink’ meets the gospels, but that would involve identifying Judas’s stand in and therein lies a major spoiler. Let’s just say that an oft-referenced but never seen studio boss is the Coen Brothers’ absent God, Scarlett Johannsen is the Virgin Mary and studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is Everyman and the film itself a chronicle of his long dark night of the soul.

Or you could possibly make a case for Mannix as Jesus, particularly in terms of his temptation, but I prefer the idea of naïve cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Aiden Ehrenrecih) as Christ, which would seem to work in context of his deliverance of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) – a man who falls among, if not thieves, then writers … and communist writers, to boot.

Either way, the film starts with an image of Christ on the cross and ends with a purposefully hackneyed pan up to the firmament, so we’re definitely in religious territory. Mannix has his most soulful conversations in a confessional, and grabs prayer beads and silently implores the Almighty for guidance at his moment of greatest uncertainty. Granted, outside of his faith he happily slaps around anyone whose peccadilloes might bring the studio into disrepute, complicitly pays off kidnappers and deals with rival sibling gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton) with the aplomb of Machiavelli, but at heart he’s still Everyman, his path is a difficult one and his decisions don’t come easily.

Religion has always bubbled away in the background in the Coens’ filmography, be it John Goodman’s pseudo-Satan and the corridors of a fleapit hotel as an entryway to hell in ‘Barton Fink’, or the mass baptism in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, but it wasn’t until ‘A Simple Man’ that the theological truly shouldered its way to the forefront. ‘Hail, Caesar’ offers a scene of four religious spokesmen trading ecumenical verbal bitch-slappings that manages to say more about religion than ‘A Simple Man’ does in its entire running time. 

Or I could be misconstruing things entirely and ‘Hail, Caesar’ is nothing more than an excuse for Joel and Ethan to restage some of their favourite scenes and genre tropes from the golden age of Hollywood. God knows, they certainly stuff enough of their own back catalogue into the blender. The obvious points of reference are ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘The Big Lebowski’: such narrative as ‘Hail, Caesar’ scrapes together (the film happily introduces all manner of characters, situations, subplots and symbolism only to completely forget them again) is basically a conflation of those two earlier films. But plenty of other moments from the Coen back catalogue are included.

It would, in fact, be very easy to write off ‘Hail, Caesar’ as the Coens doing sloppy, second-rate Coen copyism, but that misses out on how entertaining the whole big stupid shaggy dog story is. How entertaining and how intelligent. Weaving McCarthyism, socio-political debate, economics, faith, doubt, moral elasticity and spiritual angst into the fabric of its (un)reality, the Coens’ script is an exercise in Big Concepts played out against a deliberately superficial backdrop. Oh, and it’s laugh out loud funny for a good 80% of its running time.

A plot synopsis would be a self-defeating exercise, so I’m not going there. Analysis of individual performances? All over the place, from Clooney being spectacularly in on the joke and owning every scene he’s in, to Brolin effectively anchoring the film without actually doing anything he hasn’t done a dozen times already, to Jonah Hill in a cameo that proves that once you’ve worked for Scorsese you can blag your way into any prestige production, to complete unknown Ehrenreich basically writing himself a cheque for his entire Hollywood career in one magnificently conceptualised performance. An extended scene where Ehrenreich’s total rube and Ralph Fiennes’s snootily sophisticated director play off each other is pure delight on a level the Coens haven’t delivered in a good few years.

It’s a profoundly deep film and utterly throwaway at one and the same time. It’s about a lot of things and adds up to something slightly less than sweet fuck all. There’s a scene of the communist writers at rest, two of them demurely completing a jigsaw together, only the last piece doesn’t fit. That’s the whole film, right there.

True Grit

Permit me to hawk up a loogie and spit on an icon.

Ready? Got your burning torches lit? Rounded up a posse? Tar and feathers to hand? Rail on order to run me out of town on?

Okay, here goes: I’m not keen on John Wayne.

There: I said it.

I’m not keen on him because of his swaggering self-satisfaction, I’m not keen on him because of his right wing agenda (this is, after all, the guy who starred in and co-directed a pro-Vietnam movie), and I’m not keen on him because, frankly, the guy couldn’t act. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that there are plenty of John Wayne performances which are downright embarrassing.

In Henry Hathaway’s ‘True Grit’, the sight of The Duke as Rooster Cogburn riding full pelt into a gunfight, reins clamped between his teeth, pistols in both hands, is so obviously a striving for macho iconography that it’s almost laughable. In the Coen Brothers’ spot-on remake, the sight of Jeff Bridges doing exactly the same thing is a thrilling piece of cinema: from the world-weariness with which he lifts the reins and bites down on them, to the blink-and-you-miss-it hint of desperation, to the audacity of his Light Brigade-style charge against superior numbers, this moment alone would probably be enough to make me dance on the saloon roof declaring the film the best western since ‘Unforgiven’.

Shout it loud, then, that the rest of ‘True Grit’ is just as good. Going back to the morality (and almost comedic absurdity) of Charles Portis’s novel, the Coens get it intuitively right in every aspect that Hathaway got it wrong. Gone the wooden characterisation of LaBoeuf by Glen Campbell; in its place, a fine and entertainingly self-deprecating supporting performance courtesy of Matt Damon. Gone the missing-the-point casting of then 22-year old Kim Darby as the 14-year old narrator and all-too-young heroine Mattie Ross; in its place a simply remarkable turn from Hailee Steinfeld, authentically 14 at the time of shooting, and yet inhabiting the skin of her character with a depth of nuance and a genuine screen presence that many seasoned performers three times her age would weep to achieve.

I’m still unsure, a month after I saw the film (yeah, I’m getting tardy with my reviews lately; blame it on the novel!), who I’m more impressed by: Bridges, Damon or Steinfeld. Perhaps, ultimately, Steinfeld. We all know Bridges is a great actor, and the role of Rooster Cogburn allows him to cut loose and have a little fun, while still anchoring things with an ornery gravitas. Damon was always more than just a pretty-boy leading man, and here he (pardon the pun) earns his spurs with an often hilarious portrayal of a self-important windbag.

But it’s Steinfeld who comes out of nowhere and provides the emotional core of every scene she’s in – which is basically the whole movie! That she came away empty-handed on Oscar night is a crime.

The bad guys of ‘True Grit’ do equally sterling work, with Josh Brolin on typically excellent form (after this and his breakout performance in ‘No Country for Old Men’, here’s hoping he becomes a Coens regular) and Barry Pepper bringing a gimlet-eyed depiction of career villainy to the table.

Roger Deakins, back in the fold after scheduling conflicts didn’t allow him to lens ‘Burn After Reading’, conjures a vision of the old west that is at once classically elegant, grubbily unromantic and tinged with the melancholy of reminiscence – this latter particularly appropriate as it is Mattie in middle age who recounts the story, a device that culminates in a poignant final scene.

In opting not to remake Hathaway’s film, but strip things back to the original novel, the Coen Brothers have finally given Charles Portis’s ‘True Grit’ the big screen incarnation it deserves.

Intolerable Cruelty

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedies / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 7 of 100


It would be easy to dismiss ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ as Coen Brothers lite. A frothy mainstream diversion, oodles better than the misconceived ‘Ladykillers’ remake, but still an exercise in treading water prior to their storming comeback with ‘No Country for Old Men’.

I enjoyed ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ first time I saw it, picked it up for a song on DVD a couple of years ago and I tend to treat it as movie comfort food. Crap day at work? Tired? Feeling a bit low? Need something with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments and George Clooney being smooth; a no-brainer that, by dint of its zingy 1940s screwball-comedy style dialogue and the effervescence of its leads, still manages to evince a bit of class? Look no further.

Bunging it on recently (crap day at work; muscles aching from a frozen shoulder), my wife observed, "Actually, this film’s pretty fucked up when you think about it."

And yes, beneath its day-glo audience-friendly sheen, ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ is a slap in the face to love, relationships and the sanctity of marriage. It’s a comedy about infidelity, divorce and deceit, the plot mechanics concerned with the financial ruination of one partner to the betterment of the other.



Clooney’s Miles Massey is a divorce lawyer and the president of the fictitious National Organisation of Matrimonial Attorneys, Nationwide (corporate slogan: "let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder …"). He’s bored with his success; bored with the trappings of his wealth. He wants a challenge, a struggle, an adversary. Cynicism is already writ large: our hero is shallower than a politician’s promise of the eve of election; he’s freakin’ lawyer, for Christ’s sake; and his idea of fulfilment is to prove his superiority all over again – moreover, at someone else’s expense.

(Parenthetically, Miles Massey can be reckoned as the first of Clooney’s morally compromised corporate professionals, followed by the title character in ‘Michael Clayton’ ["fixer" for a law firm] and Ryan Bingham in ‘Up in the Air’ [a downsizing specialist]. All are unlikeable by very definition of what they do for a living. Clooney’s old school movie star appeal – he has that suave but slightly self-deprecating Cary Grant thing down pat – goes a hell of a way towards making these characters palatable.)

"At someone else’s expense" is pretty much the defining theme of ‘Intolerable Cruelty’. Miles gains his edge and wins cases by employing the services of private investigation/B&E merchant Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer) in the not-always-legal acquisition of evidence; he also leaves the dirty work of acting upon Petch’s findings to right hand man Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), the risk of disbarment thus becoming Wrigley’s and not his.

Money motivates: Miles’s adversary/romantic foil Marilyn Rexroth is an out-and-out gold-digger who views the investment of a few years in a loveless marriage with an older man chosen for his dupability as a step towards financial independence. It’s as much a testament to Catherine Zeta Jones’s breezy screen persona as it is to Clooney’s smoothness that you’re not put off by the characters. Marilyn takes advice from ersatz mother figure Sarah Sorkin (Julia Duffy), a past master in remunerative divorces notwithstanding that she has ended up alone in a vast and lifeless mansion with "only a peptic ulcer to keep her warm at night".

Miles is also mentored by an older figure: senior partner Herb Meyerson (Tom Aldredge). In a film where the humour is predicated upon non-sequiturs ("Kirschner was in Kentucky!"), buffoonery ("I’m gonna nail yo’ ass!") and the impishly perverse, Herb Meyerson is more in keeping with the half-comic/half-threatening grotesques from earlier entries in the Coens’ filmography, such as the salesmen played by John Goodman in ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘O, Brother Where Art Thou?’ or Jon Polito’s mardy-arse gangster in ‘Miller’s Crossing’. Herb dwells in semi-darkness on the top floor, hooked up to who knows what kind of machines, kept alive – one imagines – purely by his grasping need to generate profits. And when his number one attorney faces financial ruin and the reputation of the firm is under threat, Herb’s reaction is unequivocal: "I’m going to talk to you about the goddamn law. We serve the law. We honour the law. And sometimes, counsellor, we obey the law. This is not one of those times."

Which is how Miles and Wrigley end up in a back-room business meeting with asthmatic and intellectually challenged hitman Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes) …

So: love is a business decision, marriage a quick trip to the Wee Kirk on the Heather (wedding music: ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’, arranged for solo bagpipe), divorce a Las Vegas-style pay-out, and if all else fails there’s always Wheezy Joe and a slapstick finale where an impending assassination plays out funnier and a lot more good natured than any of the scenes relating to matters of the wallet heart.

‘Intolerable Cruelty’ is second-rate Coens, but it’s easy to imagine that if Penny Marshall or Nora Ephron had been at the helm it would have been hailed as a slyly subversive comment on rom-com conventions. It’s one of those cases of the director(s) defining the work: by the Coens’ previous standards the cynicism is sunny, the cruelty tolerable.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Man Who Wasn't There

Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) doesn't have much to say. He's married to Doris (Frances McDormand), a hard-nosed and sharp-tongued would-be social climber who's carrying on with her boss, department store owner Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini) in hopes of fast-tracking her way to a managerial position. Ed works at his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco)'s barber's shop. Michael's the principle barber, the raconteur. The guy who yacks incessantly to the customers. Ed keeps himself to himself. Doesn't say a lot. He just cuts the hair.

One day Ed cuts the hair of entrepeneur Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), who pitches him a business deal. $10,000 and Ed can buy his way into a dry cleaning franchise as a silent partner. Ed sees it as his ticket to a better life. He sends Big Dave a blackmail note, citing knowledge of his affair with Doris and demanding $10K. Big Dave approaches Ed for advice. Ed advises him to pay.
Big Dave coughs up the moolah, but by coincidence sees Tolliver at the drop point. Unbeknowst to Ed, Tolliver had already approached Big Dave as a potential backer, asking for $10K. Big Dave puts two and two together, makes five, goes to see Tolliver, beats the truth out of him and puts two and two together a second time, this time coming up with four. Big Dave approaches Ed again, only it's not advice he wants now. This time he wants Ed's head as a paperweight.

Things take an unexpected turn, however, and Big Dave ends up dead and Ed calmly goes into work the next day like nothing happened. Then a couple of detectives visit him at the barber's shop to inform him Doris has been arrested. The cops have wised up to her affair with Big Dave and - unbeknowst to Ed - the money she's been skimming from the department store - and come up with five. She's charged with murder and arraigned for trial.

Anybody cursing me for not flagging a "spoiler alert" alert right now should take a leaf out of Ed's book: sit down, lit a cigarette, watch the world drift past and ruminate on twists of fate that life conjures up. They should also take comfort from knowing that 'The Man Who Wasn't There' - as serpentine as its plotting is (and it's the equal of 'Miller's Crossing' in this respect) - reaches a point, about halfway through when Big Dave's wife Anne Nirdlinger Brewster (Katherine Horowitz) starts speculating about UFOs and government conspiracies, where plot ceases to matter. Where the whole film reaches a level of visual poetry (frequent Coen collaborator Roger Deakins achieves a pinnacle of the cinematographer's art that can justifiably be called genius). Where the visual poetry is matched by the verbal poetry of Ed's increasingly discursive and existentialist voiceover. For a character who has the absolutely minimum of dialogue, Ed narrates screeds of voiceover.

For the record, the plot as it develops (or devolves, or branches off, depending on personal opinion) encompasses Ed's old friend Walter Abundas (Richard Jenkins) and his pianist daughter Birdie (Scarlett Johannson), and hot-shot lawyer Freddy Riedenschnieder (Tony Shalhoub), a man who builds defences around the uncertainty principle and an almost Ayn Rand-like conception of the modern man. The film's title works on two levels: the disappearence of Tolliver, potentially a crucial witness in Riedenschnieder's defence of Doris; and Ed's estimation of himself.

As the fallout from his blackmail scheme takes ever-more unpredictable turns, bizarro twists of fate complicating matters to the point that when Ed confesses all to Riedenschnieder the lawyer dismisses his entire story because he'd be unable to prove a word of it (!), everyone but Ed seems to pay the price. Like dominos falling, everyone he knows topples; is brought down. Finally, he sees in Birdie's talent for the piano a chance to be a positive influence in someone's life; a chance at redemption. Fate has other ideas in mind.


'The Man Who Wasn't There' is at once the perfect synthesis of everything the Coens had done up to that point, and a stylistic departure. A departure in that (a) it's their first and currently only production in black and white, and (b) their previous films, for all their quirkiness, are still immediate, if not visceral: think of the violence in 'Blood Simple' or 'Miller's Crossing', or the manic protagonists of 'Raising Arizona' and 'The Hudsucker Proxy' and 'O Brother Where Art Thou'. 'The Man Who Wasn't There' has a stillness about it; a detachment. Its aesthetic is reductive, to the point of a harsh clinically white set for the final scene, the sole focal point of which is the electric chair.

And yet it's a distillation of their previous work in terms of cultural touchstones: the convoluted fictions of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett inspired 'The Big Lebowski' and 'Miller's Crossing' and there are hints of both here as well as a dash of Jim Thompson - the blackmail element climaxes quarter of the way into the film, the murder element about halfway, and it's an out-and-out aftermath story thereafter; as well as in terms of visual tropes.

There is probably a scholarly paper somewhere out there entitled "Circular Images in the Films of Joel and Ethan Coen". It's probably as dry as a year-old madeira cake, full of pretentious waffle and will land its desperately earnest author a gig writing for Sight & Sound. I'm almost tempted to write it myself, but I've no truck with the kind of people who endlessly debated the meaning of the hat blowing through the woods in 'Miller's Crossing' (for fuck's sake, Tom says it himself: it was a dream and "it stayed a hat ... I didn't chase it ... nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat") so I'll simply point out the Coens' love for round objects - the tumbleweed and bowling balls in 'Lebowski' and the hula-hoop in 'The Hudsucker Proxy' are here matched by circles of light, a hubcab, the hard white disc of a searchlight and a UFO. The latter is possibly a dream or hallucination. Possibly.

I'm tempted to say 'The Man Who Wasn't There' is the ultimate Coen brothers film, only it doesn't feature John Goodman, John Turturro or George Clooney in the cast. Still, what's inarguable is that 'The Man Who Wasn't There' is achingly beautiful. Beautiful to look at. Beautiful - in Thornton's laconic narration and a soundtrack consisting almost entirely of Beethoven's piano sonatas and the Archduke Trio - to listen to. It did seem, though, for a brief time - with the entertaining but determinedly mainstream 'Intolerable Cruelty' and the just plain average 'The Ladykillers' as follow-ups - that it represented the Coens' peak. Then they made 'No Country for Old Men'. Which goes to show how much I know.

PERSONAL FAVES: Miller's Crossing

Verna: What are you chewing over?
Tom: Dream I had once. I was walking in the woods, dunno why. Wind came up, blew my hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran. Finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn't a hat anymore. It changed into something else. Something wonderful.
Tom: No, it stayed a hat. And no, I didn't chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.



'Miller's Crossing' opens in a manner deliberately evocative of 'The Godfather'. There's a man sitting behind a desk in an office dominated by dark wood. He's nonchalant, lugubrious, in control. There's a short, sweaty, agitated guy standing in front of the desk. He's come to beg a favour. But where 'The Godfather' gives us Don Corleone and Bonasera, the latter wanting justice for an assault on his daughter, the former prepared to help so long as Bonsera might one day discharge a duty to him, the set up is very different in 'Miller's Crossing'.


Behind the desk: Irish-American mob boss Leo O'Bannion (Albert Finney) and behind him his trusted lieutenant Tom Regan (Gabriel Byrne). In front of the desk - and, by the end of the scene, leaning over it, every blood vessel in his face threatening to burst, up-and-coming gangster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) and his second-in-command Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman). And the favour? Well, that concerns bent bookie Bennie Bernbaum (John Turturro) and the various reasons Johnny Caspar wants him dead. Leo ixnays the killing, reminding Johnny that "you're only as big as I let you be". Johnny storms out. Tom counsels Leo that a conflagration with Johnny and Eddie Dane would be unwise, particularly over schnook like Bennie Bernbaum. Leo laughs it off. Then the opening credits roll and what follows is just under two hours of the tricksiest, most convoluted plotting the gangster genre has ever seen.


In brief - and this is without factoring in Tom's gambling debts and the importance to the plot of fast-talking secondary character Mink (Steve Buscemi) - the rivalry between Leo and Johnny Caspar that comes to a head over Bennie Bernbaum is complicated by Leo's doting romance with Bennie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Garden), a vampish good-time girl who's working out more angles than a geometrist, and Tom's clandestine affair with same. The murder of a tail Leo puts on Verna exacerbates an already tense atmosphere.

Johnny Caspar pressures Tom to leave Leo's organisation and work with him instead. His powerplay is demonstrated by an attempt on Leo's life. However, it's unsuccessful. Leo fends off his attackers with a tommy gun (earning an approving "the old man's still an artist with a Thompson" from a minion) while "Danny Boy" plays on a wind-up gramophone.

The relationship deteriorates between Tom and Leo, culminating in the revelation that Tom and Verna have been doing the wild thing. Leo makes Tom redundant (that's the mob version of redundant, where you take a beating first then get bodily thrown off the premises) and Tom approaches Johnny Caspar to see if the job opportunity is still available. Johnny wants an act of good faith from Tom. He wants Tom to give up Bennie Bernbaum. Tom obliges, but isn't prepared for his next test of loyalty: take Bennie into the woods down near Miller's Crossing and put a bullet in his brain. Tom's not cut out for this kind of thing and when Bennie pleads for his life, Tom lets him go. Bad move. Bennie's working out a few angles of his own and it's not long before he reappears on the scene and starts making life difficult for Tom. Meanwhile, Eddie Dane - suspicious of Tom's proximity to Johnny Caspar - figures that Tom would "rather join a ladies' group" than whack a guy and takes him on a little trip back to Miller's Crossing to look for the body ...

'Miller's Crossing' has more twists than a sack of snakes - and just as much venom. More turns than a wrongly-programmed satnav - and takes you on just as confusing a journey. It's dark and cynical. It's brutally amoral and violent. In addition to the shoot-outs and molotov cocktails through windows, Tom seems to take a blow to the face every five minutes - from Leo, from Verna, from Eddie Dane, from Bennie, from any of the guys he owes money to. Everyone wants something from him, and everyone's got an angle. Amazingly, having said all that, 'Miller's Crossing' is also funny as hell. Johnny Caspar's losing-the-point monologues and Mink's mile-a-minute colloquy are hilarious verbal pyrotechnics. Elsewhere, wise-ass dialogue abounds. "If I'd known we were going to cast feelings into words, I'd've memorised the Song of Solomon," Tom muses at one point. Later, as lost for words as he is for Bennie's corpse, Tom walks fearfully through the woods. "You ever notice," Eddie Dane observes, "how the smart dialogue dries up the moment a guy starts soiling his union suit."

But it's Verna - and Marcia Gay Harden has never been better - who has the last word. When Tom, looking for her at Leo's behest, angrily bursts into a powder room and confronts her, she asks, "Shouldn't you be doing your job ?" He replies, "Intimidating helpless women is my job." Her comeback: "Then go find one and intimidate her." Amen, sister!

Coen brothers double bill

The Coen brothers' filmography is a hymn to crime cinema, deviating from the brutally serious to the seriously off-kilter in typically subversive and iconic style.

Consider the brooding neo-noirs of their remarkable debut 'Blood Simple' and their masterful return to form 'No Country for Old Men'. Consider the slapstick capers on display in their frenetic sophomore film 'Raising Arizona' and their somewhat misconceived Ealing comedy remake 'The Ladykillers'. Consider the complications of kidnapping in wintry police prodecural 'Fargo' and Chandleresque slacker fave 'The Big Lebowski'.

Consider crims on the run in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and gangsters whose hats have a tendency to gust poetically through the woods in 'Miller's Crossing'. Consider a man who just cuts hair getting in deeper and deeper in 'The Man Who Wasn't There'.

Even their more lightweight films are layered with lawlessness, be it corporate crookery in 'The Hudsucker Proxy' or a plot development involving a bumbling asthmatic hitman in 'Intolerable Cruelty'.

In fact, with 'Burn After Reading' just a stone's throw from the crime genre (it's an espionage tale, but one set in motion by an act of theft), there's really only 'Barton Fink' that doesn't fit into the scheme of things. Unless of course the crime in question is that done by Hollywood to the artist.

Two Coen classics in the offing today, both from the personal faves list.

Myth, majesty and malevolence: three modern American classics

What do 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford', 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There Will Be Blood' have in common, apart from being three of the finest films I've seen in the last three months?

Firstly, they're all adaptations - 'Assassination' and 'No Country' from novels of the same title by Ron Hansen and Cormac McCarthy, 'Blood' from 'Oil!' by Upton Sinclair. In a current cinematic climate of shoddy remakes and sequels shot through with the law of diminishing returns, they represent high-quality film-making drawn from bona fide literary sources.

The titles say a lot. I love the 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' for its unapologetic length (seventeen syllables; the same as in a haiku) and for the fact that it encapsulates the film's entire dynamic: that James and Ford will play equally significant parts in the story, that things will move inexorably towards an act of violence, and that history will record Ford as a chicken-shit. You can't say it fast, either. Listen to people asking for tickets at the box office ("Two-for-'Over-Her-Dead-Body'-please", "One-for-'Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks'-please"); by and large they blurt out the title as if embarrassed to be heard buying a ticket for such formulaic pap or desperate to get to the popcorn stand. Try it with 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'. It almost demands you to pause in at least three places - 'The Assassination ... of Jesse James ... by the Coward ... Robert Ford'. It's a weighty and serious title, one that tells you you're in for something epic, something that's going to demand your attention.

'No Country for Old Men' functions on a different level. There's an enigmatic quality to it. It sounds poetical. It is. The phrase comes from W.B. Yeats' poem 'Sailing to Byzantium'. Again, it carries weight and significance when spoken aloud.

So, too, 'There Will Be Blood'. Four granite-like monosyllables. There's no modulation to them, no rhythm. Each word falls from the tongue as bluntly and solidly as the one that proceeds it. 'There Will Be Blood'. It's a statement. There's no way around it. Likewise, the film will have no last-reel reprieve. There's only one way the story's going: straight into the heart of darkness.

They're all epic: 'Assassination' and 'Blood' in their two-hour-forty-minute running times, the scope and sweep of their stories; 'No Country' in its striking vistas and elegiac tone. All boast the kind of cinematography that remind me why I fell in love with cinema as an art form in the first place. Cinema is, first and foremost, a visual medium; one wherein movement is crucial. That's where the word "movie" comes from after all: moving picture. All three films have magnificent - but not prettified - cinematography. It comes as no surprise that genius lensman Roger Deakins shot two of them, with Robert Elswit more than worthy of comparison to Deakins for his work on 'There Will Be Blood'.

It's tempting to describe all three as the work of directors at the top of their game - for the Coens, 'No Country' is their best in a decade and the equal of the half dozen or so works in their filmography that can genuinely be called classics; for Paul Thomas Anderson, 'Blood' is a quantum leap from the confident and technically brilliant but ultimately somewhat soulless stylisations of his previous features - but how can I apply this description to Andrew Dominik? 'Assassination' is only his second film (after 'Chopper', which I must confess I've never seen). Is he at the top of his game so soon into his career? Or will he scale even greater heights, make even more impressive films? Oh God, I hope so!

They are all films about greed. 'No Country' and 'Blood' in particular take scenarios that are almost cliches - respectively: otherwise honest man finds bag full of drug money and goes on the run; prospector is driven to dangerous measures in his pursuit of oil - while 'Assassination' touches on greed in the fiscal sense in that Jesse James (Brad Pitt) has created his own myth carving out a career as a ruthless and violent thief, but also examines psychological greed - that of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), half in love with and half pathologically jealous of James, wanting to be him but always falling short, a laughing stock among his peers.

'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' has two main characters, but no protagonist - no-one you could remotely consider a hero. James is vicious, paranoid, as quick to kill those who ride with him as those who oppose him. Ford is a spiteful child awkwardly inhabiting a man's body. Two antagonists tear the screen apart in 'There Will Be Blood': oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).

'No Country for Old Men' divides its screen time between three main characters: Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong and takes the money instead of turning round and getting the hell out of there; Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a methodically efficient killing machine dispatched by various underworld types to retrieve said currency; and Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a small-town lawman steeped in the past, unable to come to terms with changing times (Jones is perfectly cast here, having already explored these kind of Peckinpah-esque themes in his excellent directorial debut 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada').

All three films have their share of violence: Chigurh's chillingly dispassionate executions; James' casual brutality and almost knowing acceptance of Ford's act of cowardly treachery; Plainview's increasingly vehement battle of wills with Sunday, including a jaw-dropping scene where Plainview whores his atheism and allows, in return for permission to build a pipeline across a parishoner's land, Sunday to baptise him into his self-styled Church of the Third Revelation, physically beating the "demons" out of Plainview while forcing the prospector to decry that he's a sinner who has abandoned his child. The reversal of this scene, at the end, veers from nervous hilarity to catharsis to shocking finality.

They all have endings that will challenge the complacent film-goer, reared on traditional three-act structure and neatly tied-up endings. 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' has its conventional climax - Ford's murder of James - two hours in, then goes on to explore Ford's brief fame and lasting infamy, the shadow it throws across his life, the inevitable circularity of his own death. 'There Will Be Blood' climaxes after fifteen wordless minutes as Plainview's initial efforts to find oil are gloriously rewarded. What follows is a study in commerce vs. religion (although, for Plainview, oil clearly is his religion; the triumphant way he mouthes the word "pipeline" after what should have been the humiliation of his baptism says it all); a weighing up of the price of oil.

It can be argued that the climax of 'No Country for Old Men' happens before the film opens: the double-cross and ensuing shoot-out that leaves men dead and pick-up trucks riddled with bullets in the middle of nowhere. What follows, follows as a result. Fortune - good or ill - plays a greater part here than narrative. Film and book are titled from a poem; a phrase by another poet, William Ernest Henley, applies: "the vagaries of chance".

These films are studies in aftermath. They are straight up masterpieces.