Unbroken (2014)

For Veterans Day, I picked the first new-to-me war movie I found on Netflix. I did not know that it was directed by Angelina Jolie and co-written by the Coen Brothers, but those facts would have increased my curiosity.

In 1943, Olympic runner Louie Zamperini (Jack O'Connell) is serving as a U.S. Air Force captain when his plane gives out over the Pacific. For nearly half the movie, he and the other two crash survivors, Phil (Domnhall Gleeson) and Mac (Finn Witrock), are holding out on rafts. Then they get taken as POWs, which is a worse situation in some ways, particularly under the war crime-level command of "the Bird" (Miyavi).

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

I liked the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit, tho I later learned to prefer the original. This other western has sat on my list for a while; I hesitated because it's only moderately popular and these guys are a gamble to me. Kind of an ugly title, too. But the continuing use of the "First time?" meme increased my curiosity.

Buster (Tim Blake Nelson) actually doesn't appear for long, because this is an anthology of six stories, each with completely different characters and actors (among them Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, James Franco, Stephen Root, Clancy Brown, Tyne Daly, and Brendan Gleeson). Two of them are based on literary short stories. The others seem to pay more homage to movies. Apart from the Old West setting, the main unifying theme is death.

Blood Simple (1984)

I had seen a dozen Coen brothers movies. My overall impression was that they are very skilled at the craft, whether going goofy or gritty, but always include something strange and unsatisfying, seemingly to annoy viewers on purpose. I got curious about their first feature-length effort, an indie, which was the only entry on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills I hadn't seen yet.

Texan bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires PI Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to see whether Marty's wife, Abby (Frances McDormand in her screen debut), is cheating on him. She is -- with one of his employees, Ray (John Getz). When his own confrontations prove fruitless, Marty asks Visser to kill Abby and Ray. He learns the hard way not to try to make a hit man out of someone who wasn't in that line of work to begin with. But that's just Act 1. Characters get confused from there, and as their panic mounts, so do the dangerous mistakes....