Synopsis
Vignettes weaving together the stories of six individuals in the old West at the end of the Civil War. Following the tales of a sharp-shooting songster, a wannabe bank robber, two weary traveling performers, a lone gold prospector, a woman traveling the West to an uncertain future, and a motley crew of strangers undertaking a carriage ride.
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Cast
- Tim Blake NelsonBuster Scruggs (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Willie WatsonThe Kid (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Clancy BrownCurly Joe (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Danny McCarthyCurly Joe's Brother (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- David KrumholtzFrenchman (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Thomas WingateGun Check Man (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Tim DeZarnMean-Eyed Card Player (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- E.E. BellPiano Player (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Alejandro PatiñoCantina Bartender (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
- Tom ProctorCantina Bad Man (segment "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs")
Recommendations
- 100
The Telegraph
Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard. - 90
Screen Daily
Ballad doesn’t reinvent the Coens’ sardonic, measured aesthetic, but the anthology’s looser structure allows them a friskiness that is welcome from such masterful veterans. - 80
The Guardian
The Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence. - 80
CineVue
Even magnificent scenery like this can get dull if there’s no invention or novelty to proceedings, but fortunately the six tales collected in the dusty old hardback book The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the Wild West, complete with colour plates and tracing paper, are packed with originality, poetry and glorious wit. - 80
Time
It’s effective in a somber way, and as shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, it’s dazzling to look at, a reinvention of classic literature of the old west with a storybook feel. - 70
TheWrap
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will be, at best, a charming footnote in the Coens’ career, a project they enjoyed doing, and possibly even more enjoyed turning into a film so they can keep their résumé free of episodic television. - 70
Variety
Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
Part sincere and part smarmy, part amusing and part windy nonsense, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays like an old Western-themed vaudeville show featuring six unrelated sketches of drastically differing quality.
