The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / **** (2018)

A cheery outlaw kicks back in the saddle of a wandering horse while singing a whimsical melody. A foreboding figure enters a bank, attempts to rob it, and is thrust into a series of repeating encounters with a hangman’s noose. A crippled orator with exemplary memory skills is peddled across the frontier by an impresario with dark ulterior motives. An old man, seeking fortune, sets up camp in a beautiful valley to discover its great secrets, even though it may be at the cost of his safety. Siblings join the Oregon trail with monetary agendas, only to be thwarted by disease and unlikely circumstances. And a carriage carrying five strangers wanders through the desolate hills before diverting them, quite literally, into the middle of an existential crisis. Somehow, someway, all these narrative threads matter enough to the Coen brothers to make up the six stories of “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” an anthology that claims to be about the varying sorts of personalities populating the Old West. But I suspect the agenda runs deeper for them than that. And as I sat and observed their yarns, dumbfounded by some and enthralled by others, I looked beyond the zealous wonder of their film to sense a transcendent undertow, as if they were summarizing the entirety of their careers in episodes that each play like the different ideals they carry in an aesthetic arsenal.

Hell or High Water / **** (2016)

The opening scenes of “Hell or High Water” establish the broader intentions of this story: a failed system against its most hardened victims. The latter are a pair of brothers, aged beyond physical measures, forced into personal decisions that reflect a cynicism birthed by grief and poverty. They arrive at a local bank in the heart of small-town Texas wearing ski masks and holding pistols, but undertake a robbery of unorthodox specifics: they will only steal small bills, allowing them avoid the obligatory tracing as they repeat the dangerous routine over a series of unsuspecting stops. As they progress, so do the confrontations; nervous sorts quickly become replaced by more audacious observers, leading to shoot-outs that acquire the attention of the Texas Rangers division. What are they doing this for? What is their destination? The sarcastic but perceptive Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) has a good grasp on the situation but not much of an understanding on motive – no doubt because in the barren isolation of the Texas desert, motives become incidental to the authorities that are after them.

The Hateful Eight / ***1/2 (2015)

What charms this bitch got, to make a man brave a blizzard and kill in cold blood? I’m sure I dunno.

A carriage at the edge of a blizzard trots hastily across silent miles of snowy terrain, galloping towards a destination that it may never reach. It stops only twice: once to pick up a stranded bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and three of his prized corpses, and again to rescue a drifting would-be sheriff (Walton Coggins), on his way to be sworn into his newly-elected position. Already aboard are two coarse faces carrying distinct agendas: one also a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) who speaks in urgent commands, and the other his prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose eyes shift to and fro as if suggesting mutilated euphemisms conceal more devious intentions. Their inadvertent union is one of perplexity and discomfort, but their wicked smiles do not reveal the details of that unease. There is dialogue, too – a rather abundant supply of it, and it carries their strange destinies towards a plot scenario in which they become stranded with another four strangers, all walled up in a rickety cabin just as the menacing blizzard overtakes them. On some subterranean level, they are meant to converge this way – as pieces on a chess board that seems made to inspire violence and chaos, all under the ruse of intense suspicion. What secrets do they carry? Those certainties are less important than the question of why, because the root of the greatest movie westerns is understanding the morality of the man holding the gun, not what brought him to that key moment of reaching for it.

A Million Ways to Die in the West / **1/2 (2014)

So much comedic skill trickles from the brain of Seth MacFarlane that it comes as a surprise to see it all circumscribed in a movie as half-realized as “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” It might have helped if he had stuck with the sitcom format. Certainly this premise was instinctively attractive on paper; after creating rousing cartoon comedies in “Family Guy” and “American Dad” and being the guiding influence of 2012’s hilarious “Ted,” here was the right man to helm a parody on the old west, where targets are ripe for the picking and clichés abundant enough to inspire terrific laughs. But what a miscalculated muddle it all amounts to, lumbering around on screen like a lethargic underachiever in a school of high-aiming competitors in the era of immeasurable gross-out comedies. At one point the main character makes a passive admission that underscores the movie’s very own energy level: “I’m not the hero. I’m the guy in the crowd making fun of the hero’s shirt.” It turns out he’s not very reliable at doing that, either.

Open Range / *** (2003)

It doesn't take much of an investigation to see why movie westerns died out following John Wayne's demise. Without the charisma and the energy that the Duke pumped into it during his 60-year career, the genre lost its only source of redemption, inevitably exposing it as the cliché-ridden world of limited ideas that it had become in the years since its inception. Of course, no one bothered to argue about those traits in old Hollywood because the concept of being formulaic was still too primitive for anyone to really care. But when Wayne passed on in the late 70s, so did the wall shielding the eyes from the truth. Like the documentary, a western is only as good as the one who carries you through it, and there is no denying that few (if any) could compare to the way in which Wayne kept fans of the films interested and caring, at least towards the end when the concept grew tired.