Critics reviews

The section of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs titled “Meal Ticket” is the best in the film. The darkest, bleakest, and the most macabre, this vignette evokes the hellish carnival world of Tod Browning’s The Unknown and Freaks.

Craft isn’t everything in art, but it counts for a lot. Even when you’re going against tradition, you can’t just willy-nilly do whatever. . . . So if we simply talk of the Coens’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a grim, occasionally grotesque and zany take on Western conventions, we’re apt to take for granted just what a trim, absorbing piece of sheer filmmaking it is.

The Coen Brothers’ second foray (after True Grit) into the pure western—what John Wayne called “the only American art form”—is a ravishing, noble, and poignant chronicle of utter turpitude and degradation.

The wall-to-wall morbidity of Buster Scruggs, which matures into surprisingly soulful territory, reminds me that as much as they goof off, the Coens might have realized they aren't spring chickens themselves.

If not a disappointment, a puzzling entry into canon replete with far superior works.

This entire project turns patriotic nostalgia into decadence. It’s an Ocasio-Cortez concept: to denounce the American past while getting freakish, googly-eyed enjoyment out of it.

Its genius lies in how its page-turning structure—one short story after another after another—works to numb, distance, and then resensitize us to the dread and loss lurking underneath even the tallest tales.

You’ll be tempted to pick favorites. But the real pleasure here is in watching ideas unfold across and between these stories.

It is a movie put together from bits and pieces of cinematic tropes, conventions, and clichés, including ones borrowed from a range of genres, from ingenious physical comedy to romantic lyricism to Gothic horror. But all are united by a giddy Western revisionism centering upon a common theme: the relentless cruelty, wanton violence, deadly recklessness, and cavalier abuses of unchecked power.

Even as “Buster Scruggs” is more frolicsome than, say, “No Country for Old Men” or “Inside Llewyn Davis,” it’s also in its way as haunting as either of those films.

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

Like most books of short stories, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has some entries that will stay with you longer than others. . . . As the pages turn, it’s sometimes hard to work out just what these specific bleak visions of frontier life have in common, why it was important to get them on film and string them together in this order.