A middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly explains how she drove him to it ... A fat little mafioso is going to war -- in the clean, well-mannered streets of Minneapolis...A Jewish boy watches with wonder the rise and fall of a Hebrew school rebel -- and sees the sadness at the heart of his own family.... Welcome to the world of Ethan Coen, one half of the filmmaking team that has unleashed a visionary, brutal, and uproarious portrait of America in such screen classics as Fargo and Raising Arizona. Now Ethan Coen translates that vision to the printed page -- in fourteen keenly imagined, sharply etched short stories. Blending parody with pathos, making the heinous heartbreaking. Coen demonstrates his unique gift for stunningly inventive narrative, brutal irony, offbeat characters, and crackling dialogue, delivering everything you would expect from such an original imagination.

Tom Hanks stars in this historical drama, set during the Cold War, directed by Steven Spielberg. When Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) sits down on a park bench in Brooklyn, New York, a secret message left for him causes the FBI to arrest him under suspicion of being a Soviet spy. When insurance lawyer James B. Donovan (Hanks) is assigned to Abel's defence, he finds his new challenge increasingly difficult as the defendent refuses to co-operate. The cast also includes Amy Ryan, Alan Alda and Domenick Lombardozzi.

Hail, Caesar! is the story of Eddie Mannix, tireless pursuer of the interests of fictional Capitol Pictures, circa 1951. He is the ultimate studio fixer and---since the studio is his world---the ultimate earthly one. There is no star scandal he cannot cover up, no studio misstep he cannot repair, no sin he cannot make right. His powers are tested, though, when production on the studio's most expensive picture ever---biblical epic Hail, Caesar!---is halted by the kidnapping of its star. The kidnappers are a mysterious gaggle seeking not just ransom but the destruction of everything Eddie Mannix lives for, and everything he lives by. . .

Inside Llewyn Davis chronicles a struggling young folk singer, played by Oscar Isaacs, who arrives in Manhattan in 1961 and tries to navigate the treacherous waters of the the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, as well as having to deal with a disaffected girlfriend, his father's dementia, the suicide of his musical partner, and the loss of his friend's cat . . . Suffused with the music of the time, the film is an emotional journey inside the soul of Llewyn Davis.

The Big Lebowski begins with a case of mistaken identity which escalates when Jeffrey Lebowski, alias The Dude, attempts to seek recompense for the despoliation of his cheap old hallway rug, and then finds himself entangled in a kidnapping caper as a bagman—a situation that goes from bad to worse due to the interference of his hapless bowling partners. In this typically smart, funny, engaging, and well-written film, the Coen brothers give the world of Raymond Chandler a decidedly postmodern spin, while at the same time leaving Philip Marlowe's ethos intact as The Dude wanders through the fractured Los Angeles of the 1990s trying to do the right thing. Like the brothers' award-winning Fargo, The Big Lebowski is suffused with a droll humor and a verbal felicity that are both delightful and startling.

Death is always the issue-in life, and in the Western. Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a movie of six Western stories. In each, our common destination is approached by a different road. Through each, diverse characters hurry for their final appointment: Oregon Trail-travelers, a gold prospector, a motley crew of stagecoach passengers, a high-plains drifting bank robber, even a singing cowboy. These six stories escort them with a care that either respects, or mocks, the dignity of all. The film stars Tom Waits, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tim Bake Nelson and Zoe Kazan and is shot with the harsh grandeur of the classic John Ford westerns.

It is 1967 and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him since she has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues. His domestic woes accumulate: his unemployable brother Larry is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is playing hooky from Hebrew school, and his daughter is sneaking money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation, thus putting in jeopardy Larry's chances for tenure at the university. As if all this wasn't enough, he is tormented by the sight of his beautiful next door neighbor sunbathing nude.

Larry's search for some kind of equilibrium is conveyed with the kind of humor, imagination, and verbal wit that have made the work of Ethan and Joel Coen so distinctive.

Provocative, revealing, and often hilarious poems by the Oscar-winning screenwriter of" No Country for Old Men"
In his screenplays and short stories, Ethan Coen surprises and delights us with a rich brew of ideas, observations, and perceptions. In his first collection of poems he does much the same. The range of his poems is remarkable-funny, ribald, provocative, sometimes raw, and often touching and profound.
In these poems, Coen writes of his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments, his career in Hollywood, his physically demanding love affair with Mamie Eisenhower, and his decade-long battle with amphetamines that produced some of the lengthier poems in the collection. You will chuckle, nodding with recognition as you turn the pages, perhaps even stopping occasionally to read.

The greatest criminal minds of all time finally meet their match in this, the Coen brothers' riotous Deep South reinvention of Alexander Mackendrick's beloved 1955 Ealing comedy. Tom Hanks stars as Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D., a charlatan professor who has assembled a motley crew of crooks to try and pull off the heist of the century. Their base of operations is the root cellar of an unsuspecting church-going lady by the name of Mrs Munson (Irma P. Hall). The story they offer Mrs Munson is that they are a band of musicians in need of a place to practise their church music. But it fast becomes apparent that Dorr's gang - 'hippety-hop' enthusiast Gawain MacSam, demolition 'expert' Garth Pancake, Vietnamese ex-tunnel rat 'The General', and football jock Lump - may not be up to the mission at hand. Moreover, they have all seriously underestimated their upstairs host . . .

These four early works by the internationally lauded filmmaking team deal with the subject for which they are best known: corruption and crime in situations that combine the real and the surreal with the hilarious.

Blood Simple deals with a cuckolded Texan bar owner who hires a slimy private investigator to kill his unfaithful wife and her boyfriend, but this is merely the start of a grisly chain of back-stabbings and murders.

In Raising Arizona, oddly paired criminal H.I. McDonnough and police woman Edwina marry, only to discover they are unable to conceive a child. In the name of parenthood, the couple kidnap one of the quintuplets of furniture tycoon Nathan Arizona. While trying to keep their crime a secret, H.I's convict friends, his boss, and even the Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse look to use Nathan Jr. for their own purposes.

Miller's Crossing, set in the era of Prohibition, focuses on Tom Reagan, the trusted lieutenant of irish crime boos Leo, endeavours to keeps the peace when Leo gets locked into a feud with rival mobster Jonny Caspar.

This edition also includes Barton Fink—an intense look at the psychological ruin of a New York playwright trying to make it in 1940s Hollywood—which is a masterful culmination of these themes.

Two gym instructors (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) accidentally stumble across and try to sell a disk containing the memoirs of CIA agent Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), who has recently resigned from the agency in a fit of pique. Their attempts at blackmail go wildly awry, gradually engulfing Osborne Cox's estranged wife (Tilda Swinton) and her lover (George Clooney), whose involvement triggers a series of tragic consequences. In "Burn After Reading" Joel and Ethan Coen take on the spy thriller genre and reinvent it in their unique voice - combining humor and violence in completely unexpected ways, and wrapping it all up with a the verbal dexterity that makes their work so distinctive.