Coen Brothers

The screen reads "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia," and the footfalls of spooks in suits resound on the soundtrack - heels clicking down the gleaming corridors like tap dancers in slow motion, or ice cubes in a glass of Scotch. And so begins the Coen brothers' ricocheting spy spoof/sex farce/midlife crisis comedy, Burn After Reading . And speaking of Scotch: Osborne Cox, a veteran analyst on Langley's Balkans desk, has just been told to retire. He's a drunk, his higher-ups say. At which point John Malkovich, in his rumpled Brooks Brothers - and in high dudgeon, playing this bow-tied CIA guy, Cox - goes ballistic.

GIMME FIVE "True Grit" gave the Coen brothers their first box office smash and membership in the $100 million club. 1. "True Grit," $171 million. 2. "No Country for Old Men," $74 million. 3. "Burn After Reading," $60 million. 4. "O Brother, Where Art Thou," $45 million. 5. "The Ladykillers," $39 million.

THE DOOMED folks in "No Country For Old Men" struggle to find words to explain the relentless embodiment of evil who stalks them across the Texas plains. But it's not so hard, really - any dude who can reach adulthood with a haircut that bad has to be one mean SOB. You'll meet him in this riveting new movie from the Coen brothers, brilliantly adapted from the award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. Set in 1980 in South Texas, it opens when a good 'ol boy named Moss (Josh Brolin)

The screen reads "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia," and the footfalls of spooks in suits resound on the soundtrack - heels clicking down the gleaming corridors like tap dancers in slow motion, or ice cubes in a glass of Scotch. And so begins the Coen brothers' ricocheting spy spoof/sex farce/midlife crisis comedy, Burn After Reading. And speaking of Scotch: Osborne Cox, a veteran analyst on Langley's Balkans desk, has just been told to retire. He's a drunk, his higher-ups say. At which point John Malkovich, in his rumpled Brooks Brothers - and in high dudgeon, playing this bow-tied CIA guy, Cox - goes ballistic.

Ever since the success of the Coen brothers, it seems that every studio in Hollywood, a hotbed of mimicry, has to have a brother act. The Coen brothers were followed by the Hughes brothers ("Menace II Society"), who were followed by the Wachowski brothers ("Bound"), who are now followed by the Pate Brothers, Josh and Jonas, and their awful debut feature, "Deceiver. " The movie stars Tim Roth, and apparently not even two directors working side by side are enough to contain his scenery-chewing.

SOME GOOD movies in the bin this week, starting with the Coen brothers' Oscar-nominated "True Grit. " It's their more grounded-in-reality take on the iconic John Wayne classic, with Jeff Bridges as the U.S. marshal who helps a girl (Hailee Steinfeld) find the man (Josh Brolin) who killed her father. Superb support from Matt Damon, though I fear this movie will suffer in a small-screen downsizing. There's a featurette on "True Grit" novelist Charles Portis - it's a great book, well worth a read.

While TV lesbians wrestle with the issue of coming out of the closet, the female lead in the movie "Bound" does not equivocate. Beaten, bound, gagged and literally locked in a closet, Corky (Gina Gershon) - a declared lesbian with tattoos and a pickup truck and everything - cuts her bonds and bursts out with a triumphant karate kick. It's a wildly campy moment, typical of the movie's smarty-pants approach to the gritty crime drama it aims to tell, making "Bound" the latest independent caper film to pay homage to the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

They say timing is everything, and it could certainly help "Drowning Mona," a movie about a town where everybody has good reason to resent Bette Midler. If nothing else, it seems ideally positioned to exploit a moviegoing public that has just seen Midler in "Isn't She Great. " This time, Miss M stars as a raging hag of a matriarch in a tacky, rural village, where everybody drives a Yugo (the cars were test-marketed there in the 1970s) and where Three Dog Night still blares on the jukeboxes.

AFTER 20 YEARS of distinctive movies, cult favorites and even an Oscar-winner, the Coen brothers now have something they've never had before - a big hit. One that is, to borrow (and sanitize) a phrase from "O Brother Where Art Thou," gosh-darn bone fide. In "True Grit," they have their first $100 million movie. Actually $110 million, and counting. That's the good news. The bad news is, the Hollywood Reporter has compared it with "The Blind Side," which must shake the "Big Lebowski" auteurs to their core.

If you were making a movie based on Homer's epic poem, "The Odyssey," you probably wouldn't start in the Depression-era South of the 1930s. Your heroes wouldn't be three escaped fugitives from a Mississippi chain gang. And even if you thought to cast John Goodman as the Cyclops, you probably wouldn't have made him a bible salesman. This wouldn't make you a bad filmmaker. It just wouldn't make you the Coen brothers. By now, it should surprise no one that Joel and Ethan Coen ("Raising Arizona," "Fargo")

GIMME FIVE "True Grit" gave the Coen brothers their first box office smash and membership in the $100 million club. 1. "True Grit," $171 million. 2. "No Country for Old Men," $74 million. 3. "Burn After Reading," $60 million. 4. "O Brother, Where Art Thou," $45 million. 5. "The Ladykillers," $39 million.

SOME GOOD movies in the bin this week, starting with the Coen brothers' Oscar-nominated "True Grit. " It's their more grounded-in-reality take on the iconic John Wayne classic, with Jeff Bridges as the U.S. marshal who helps a girl (Hailee Steinfeld) find the man (Josh Brolin) who killed her father. Superb support from Matt Damon, though I fear this movie will suffer in a small-screen downsizing. There's a featurette on "True Grit" novelist Charles Portis - it's a great book, well worth a read.

IF WE THINK of the Coen brothers' career as Jeff Lebowski's living room, we realize that despite the eight Oscars on the mantelpiece, something's missing. Something that would really pull the room together. No dude, not a rug. A blockbuster. A hit movie that would earn these fringe artists and cult filmmakers the warm embrace of the general moviegoing public. "True Grit" is that movie, and, in true Coen style, it's not behaving like a regular hit. At more than $150 million and counting, it's a word-of-mouth rocket that refuses to obey the laws of box-office gravity.

AFTER 20 YEARS of distinctive movies, cult favorites and even an Oscar-winner, the Coen brothers now have something they've never had before - a big hit. One that is, to borrow (and sanitize) a phrase from "O Brother Where Art Thou," gosh-darn bone fide. In "True Grit," they have their first $100 million movie. Actually $110 million, and counting. That's the good news. The bad news is, the Hollywood Reporter has compared it with "The Blind Side," which must shake the "Big Lebowski" auteurs to their core.

Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old played by Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit , is a self-composed Arkansan who kept the books for her father's ranch until her father was shot and killed. The time is the 1870s, the West is wild, and Mattie - determined to avenge her father's death and bring the perpetrator to justice, if not to his demise - speaks with a flinty eloquence that shows uncanny intelligence and resolve. In Joel and Ethan Coen's rousing adaptation of the Charles Portis novel - their True Grit opened Wednesday - Mattie drops words like braggadocio with aplomb.

The screen reads "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia," and the footfalls of spooks in suits resound on the soundtrack - heels clicking down the gleaming corridors like tap dancers in slow motion, or ice cubes in a glass of Scotch. And so begins the Coen brothers' ricocheting spy spoof/sex farce/midlife crisis comedy, Burn After Reading. And speaking of Scotch: Osborne Cox, a veteran analyst on Langley's Balkans desk, has just been told to retire. He's a drunk, his higher-ups say. At which point John Malkovich, in his rumpled Brooks Brothers - and in high dudgeon, playing this bow-tied CIA guy, Cox - goes ballistic.

The screen reads "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia," and the footfalls of spooks in suits resound on the soundtrack - heels clicking down the gleaming corridors like tap dancers in slow motion, or ice cubes in a glass of Scotch. And so begins the Coen brothers' ricocheting spy spoof/sex farce/midlife crisis comedy, Burn After Reading . And speaking of Scotch: Osborne Cox, a veteran analyst on Langley's Balkans desk, has just been told to retire. He's a drunk, his higher-ups say. At which point John Malkovich, in his rumpled Brooks Brothers - and in high dudgeon, playing this bow-tied CIA guy, Cox - goes ballistic.

THE DOOMED folks in "No Country For Old Men" struggle to find words to explain the relentless embodiment of evil who stalks them across the Texas plains. But it's not so hard, really - any dude who can reach adulthood with a haircut that bad has to be one mean SOB. You'll meet him in this riveting new movie from the Coen brothers, brilliantly adapted from the award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. Set in 1980 in South Texas, it opens when a good 'ol boy named Moss (Josh Brolin)

If you were making a movie based on Homer's epic poem, "The Odyssey," you probably wouldn't start in the Depression-era South of the 1930s. Your heroes wouldn't be three escaped fugitives from a Mississippi chain gang. And even if you thought to cast John Goodman as the Cyclops, you probably wouldn't have made him a bible salesman. This wouldn't make you a bad filmmaker. It just wouldn't make you the Coen brothers. By now, it should surprise no one that Joel and Ethan Coen ("Raising Arizona," "Fargo")

They say timing is everything, and it could certainly help "Drowning Mona," a movie about a town where everybody has good reason to resent Bette Midler. If nothing else, it seems ideally positioned to exploit a moviegoing public that has just seen Midler in "Isn't She Great. " This time, Miss M stars as a raging hag of a matriarch in a tacky, rural village, where everybody drives a Yugo (the cars were test-marketed there in the 1970s) and where Three Dog Night still blares on the jukeboxes.