Best Coen Brothers movies, ranked: from The Big Lebowski to Blood Simple

Coen Brothers collection: £25.19 at AmazonThis Blu-ray boxset features eight of the Coens' acclaimed movies, including a bunch of our favourites below.

Fargo: £3.99 at AmazonIt’s hard to imagine any top 10 Coen movie list would snub Fargo, although the film was beaten to the Best Picture Oscar by Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. More’s the pity. Fargo is the Coens at their most Coen-y, down to the film’s opening claim that the events were inspired by a true story (they weren’t).Most memorable is Frances McDormand, who carries the movie as the determined and deadpan Marge Gunderson, searching for a pair of homicidal kidnappers. Carter Burwell’s score hangs heavy over a snowy Minnesota, as events unfold with Coen-typical absurdity. But like No Country, the heart of Fargo lies in those quiet moments of reflection where our central characters contemplate their place in the chaos.

Miller’s Crossing: £4.33 at AmazonThe Coens go gangster in their whiskey-noir set in prohibition America. Gabriel Byrne is outstanding as antihero Tom Reagan, working from a script that rat-a-tats like a tommy gun, while John Tutorro and Steve Buscemi fire on all cylinders. Just the third time Carter Burwell collaborated with the Coens, and arguably still his best score.Miller’s Crossing is an exploration of morality, entangled lovers, booze, and, err, Irishness. No Coen Brothers top ten is complete without it.

Blood Simple: £7.99 at AmazonIt’s rare that a director’s debut is still considered among their best work, but the Coens’ first feature film Blood Simple is certainly up there. It also hinted at many of the tropes that would follow: dark humour, snappy dialogue, plot twists, Frances McDormand.The film follows a saloon owner who hires a private investigator to murder his cheating wife. But, of course, things aren’t so, well, simple. The fact the brothers weren’t even 30 when they made this movie only makes us more impressed/annoyed.

Barton Fink: £3.49 at AmazonWriter’s block sucks, but if you ever find yourself in a burning room with a shotgun-wielding John Goodman, writing is probably not for you. So is the lesson for New York playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) who’s offered a lucrative deal to write a wrestling movie for Capitol Pictures. But as Fink searches for inspiration, his life becomes engulfed in its own bizarre narrative.Look a little harder and you’ll find themes of religion and the rise of fascism, which is why Fink is one of the Coens’ most anatomised movies. Still utterly relevant, still fantastic.

A Serious Man: £3.57 at AmazonPerhaps the Coens’ richest text, A Serious Man is both devastatingly funny and deeply personal. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the tortured physics professor asking the big questions about life, the universe and – chief of all – why he’s apparently the butt of a horrible cosmic joke.What follows is an existential parable of sorts, filled with thieving kids, gun-loving neighbors, fake Yiddish parables and Jefferson Airplane. Meanwhile, cinematographer Roger Deakins swaps the sprawling vistas of No Country (his previous collaboration with the Coens) for a more intimate picture that puts our tortured leading man under the Coens’ microscope. A movie that deserves to be revisited and anguished over – just don’t expect any easy answers.