![]() Tom Waits plays a Walter Huston-type gold prospector who gets into a terrible scrape. Liam Neeson is a travelling theatrical impresario, a boisterous Ulster Protestant whose star turn is his “wingless thrush”: an unfortunate young man without arms or legs but with a wonderful way of declaiming Shelley and the Gettysburg Address. James Franco plays a bank robber who miraculously avoids justice his remark to a fellow miscreant got the biggest laugh I’ve heard in a cinema this year. Could a sequel or spinoff be in prospect? More text is also shown again at the end of each story: you are given just enough time to read some of it – and one in particular appears to tell us something more, something that happens after the story ends on screen. Remembering and recognising this moment is a stab of audience-interest for each particular episode. A hand turns the pages and we see these stories in print, themselves prefaced by an illustrated plate previewing a dramatic incident from what’s to come. One or two of the stories don’t have a satisfying twist in the tail there is one disconcerting fade-out.Įach tale is prefigured with the sight of an old book, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. ![]() There’s barely a forehead that doesn’t get a bullet in it sooner or later. ![]() 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. ![]()
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