When I joked on social media that The Fugitive is a movie about how easily middle-aged white dudes can get into and out of buildings, my friends mostly laughed. Perhaps because it was presented as a declarative statement, it seems a bit reductive.
The Coen Brothers’ filmography tends to swing wildly from lighthearted, goofball larks to existential nightmare tours of wounded psyches and uneasy human relations in a fallen world. (A good argument can, and has, been made that the two modes are in direct conversation.)
It might seem odd to group The Homesman and The East together for consideration. The first is a solid but somewhat frustrating Western, with a feminist edge. The second is an embarassingly broad, largely contemptible genre picture about cartoonish, dumpster-diving eco-terrorists that consistently rings false.