My friend J.M. Tyree and I have been writing together about the Coen brothers for years now, including our BFI Film Classic book on The Big Lebowski and a number of other articles. We continue this happy collaboration with a review for Sight & Sound of the Coens’ new feature, Hail, Caesar! (pictured above), which is released in the UK today (March 4, 2016).
The film is set in Hollywood in the 1950s and, we suggest, is not only a love letter to the movies but also a picture unusually interested in technical virtuosity and in systems of belief.
Here’s the opening paragraph of the review:
Early in Hail, Caesar!, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a production executive for Capitol Pictures, rescues a budding starlet from a photographer who has her posing for ‘French postcard’ pictures in a bungalow-cum-porn-set reminiscent of the one in The Big Sleep (1946). Waiting in his car in the rain, Mannix looks like a Bogart-type hero; in fact, he’s less concerned about the dame in distress than about damage control for Capitol…
You can read the whole thing here, or in the forthcoming April 2016 edition of Sight & Sound.
