Yee-haw! Any new film from Joel and Ethan Coen is cause for celebration. So what about six new films?
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs isn’t that, exactly: The Coens’ first project for Netflix was initially rumored to be an episodic series—erroneously, it turns out—but appeared last week in your Netflix account as a single anthology film that contains six discrete stories. They’re all set in the Wild West with varying degrees of realism, and they all tackle, in that sideways Coen brothers style, the mythology and iconography of frontier America, as expressed through western books, films, and songs. Oh, and they’re all—either obliquely or directly—about death.
