At first blush, the Coen Brothers and Peter Greenaway don’t appear to have much in common except that their new films, Hail, Caesar!and Eisenstein in Guanajuato, both came out the same day. Yet their films used to share art-house marquee space in the late '80s and early '90s when they attracted notoriety and criticism of all stripes. Although their paths have diverged considerably, their new films are united by the way in which the filmmakers construct a world of artifice, steeped in references yet inhabited in very different ways: for the Coens, it’s the glitzy movie-verse of Capitol Pictures; for Greenaway, it’s a wild combination of art history, politics, and Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film, ¡Que viva México!. FILM COMMENT's Violet Lucca and Nicolas Rapold are joined by Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, and Nick Pinkerton, regular FC contributor, to discuss these films and especially the Coen Brothers' ever-evolving oeuvre.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related