The eponymous first episode centres on Buster (Nelson), an outlaw clad in spotless white who sings and narrates his every move. In a dusty saloon, he runs into Surly Joe (Brown), a rule-breaking gunslinger who underestimates Buster's criminal credentials. In Near Algodones, a cowboy (Franco) sets out to rob an empty bank, but underestimates the resourceful teller (Root) and ends up in a sticky situation. Meal Ticket follows a businessman (Neeson) travelling the countryside with a limbless actor-orator (Melling). But audiences are dwindling, and there's another option.

Next is All Gold Canyon, a paradise in which a lone prospector (Waits) painstakingly hunts a pocket of gold, watched by an owl. In The Gal Who Got Rattled, young Alice (Kazan) is left to fend for herself in her wagon train, so swarthy leader Billy (Heck) offers to help. His boss (Hines) seems dubious. And in The Mortal Remains, five people (Daly, Gleeson, Ross, O'Neill and Rubinek) travel across a barren wasteland in a carriage, telling each other stories about their lives on their way to an isolated hotel.

Each episode is shot in a way that captures the grandeur of the settings, playing cleverly on the Western genre's history. Within this, actors deliver superbly witty performances, finding details that bring each segment to life. And many of them also break out into song, for one reason or another. Each of the central characters has an encounter with death that fundamentally alters his or her perspective and future. Standouts in the excellent cast are Nelson's smiling gunslinger, Waits' tenaciously grizzled gold-rusher and Ross' chatty trapper.

The most darkly involving segment Kazan and Heck's, with a series of plot turns that both pull us into the story and remind us of the unpredictability of this time and place. Franco's brisk clip is a fiercely witty joke about justice. And Neeson and Melling's episode is the most haunting, adding a sense of pathos without any actual dialog. In their inimitable way, the Coens continue to provocatively grapple with the cruel vagaries of fate in American culture.

themes, language, violence

5.Dec.18