Storyline
Vignettes weaving together the stories of six individuals in the old West at the end of the Civil War. Following the tales of a sharp-shooting songster, a wannabe bank robber, two weary traveling performers, a lone gold prospector, a woman traveling the West to an uncertain future, and a motley crew of strangers undertaking a carriage ride.
Directors
Cast
David Krumholtz, Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Clancy Brown, Tim DeZarn, Stephen Root, Matthew Willig, Brendan Gleeson, Chelcie Ross, Harry Melling, Jonjo O'Neill, Paul Rae, Ralph Ineson, Saul Rubinek, Zoe Kazan, Danny McCarthy, J. Nathan Simmons, Billy Lockwood, Martin Palmer, Tom Waits, Tom Proctor, Grainger Hines, E.E. Bell, Bill Heck, Jackamoe Buzzell, Sam Dillon, Jefferson Mays, Tyne Daly, Austin Rising, Jesse Luken, Willie Watson, Katy Bodenhamer, Jiji Hise, Stephen R. Estler, Grace LeSueur, Ethan Dubin
Trailer
Reviews
100
Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard.
90
Ballad doesn’t reinvent the Coens’ sardonic, measured aesthetic, but the anthology’s looser structure allows them a friskiness that is welcome from such masterful veterans.
80
The Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence.
80
Even magnificent scenery like this can get dull if there’s no invention or novelty to proceedings, but fortunately the six tales collected in the dusty old hardback book The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the Wild West, complete with colour plates and tracing paper, are packed with originality, poetry and glorious wit.
80
It’s effective in a somber way, and as shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, it’s dazzling to look at, a reinvention of classic literature of the old west with a storybook feel.
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