![]() ![]() Roger Deakins Thinks ‘Kundun’ Is Scorsese’s Best Movie: ‘It’s a Tone Poem’ ![]() “Barton Fink” is a surrealistic journey into the life of the mind, a disturbing externalization of an internal struggle that’s one of the Coens’ all-time best works. ![]() It assumes multiple genres - period drama, buddy comedy, surrealist horror, Hollywood satire - without ever working within them it removes the comfortable floor from underneath the audience at every turn, not by being outrageously unpredictable but through a sustained feeling of dread that creates an air of unpredictability it owes debts to the films of Polanski, Lynch, Kubrick, and even Sturges, but it’s entirely a Coen Brothers vision. The Coen Brothers’ fourth film “ Barton Fink” is offbeat in every sense of the word. But a truly offbeat film works against traditional, established filmic rhythms, with a palpable feeling of going against the grain but never foregrounding that quality as its primary trait. A typically offbeat film, for example, tends to be filled with stylistic quirks, or a self-conscious narrative, or dare I say, “wacky” characters whose wackiness is their primary appeal. Though the term “offbeat” is synonymous with “unconventional” or “unusual,” there are nevertheless certain expectations that come with that label. This is the Criticwire Classic of the Week. Every now and then on the Criticwire Network an older film gets singled out for attention. ![]()
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