For nearly a decade, fans of Joel and Ethan Coen have had one wish and one wish only — to see them get back to making movies together again. Known collectively as the Coen Brothers, the wildly talented pair of siblings are the visionaries behind an onslaught of movies that cross over genres and speak to multiple generations. What started in 1984 with Blood Simple quickly turned into a decade-spanning career that left the duo with a multitude of awards and acclaim that only the most established in the industry can achieve. Films like The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading have left fans with unforgettable quotes while others, like Fargo, have taken on a life of their own and spawned follow-up content. And, of course, there’s also the sprawl of characters that they’ve created, with every movie outdoing the set of personalities that came before.
Tragically, the Coen dynasty seemed to have come crashing down in 2018 after the siblings paired with Netflix to create The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Following in the steps of True Grit and No Country for Old Men, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was a dark Western filled to the brim with numerous of the brothers’ longtime collaborators. Sadly, it might be the final Coen brothers flick to see the light of day as, after its release, the filmmaking team decided to venture off on their own. Joel Coen would be the first to make moves as a solo director with the arrival of the critically acclaimed The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, while his brother soon followed by way of documentary filmmaking via 2022’s Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind.
After that, it seemed that both siblings would step away from the spotlight until Ethan Coen reappeared with Drive-Away Dolls in 2024. This time, Coen worked alongside his wife Tricia Cooke as the co-scribe of the production, which saw Margaret Qualley star as a young lesbian who finds herself in a mix-up with a group of criminals after renting a car. With a vision in mind, Coen and Cooke said the title would be the first in an eventual trilogy of lesbian B-movies and soon followed it up in 2025 with Honey Don’t! While both Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! may have flopped at the box office, the latter is enjoying a slight resurgence as, according to FlixPatrol, it has worked its way onto HBO Max’s global Top 10.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
What’s ‘Honey Don’t!’ About?
Sticking to his neo-noir Western guns, Coen crafted Honey Don’t! to be a whodunnit that followed in the footsteps of his earlier musings. The film follows Qualley’s Honey O’Danahue, a private investigator who is on the case after a string of bizarre deaths are tracked back to a local church. Joining Qualley is an ensemble that includes the talents of Charlie Day, Aubrey Plaza, and Chris Evans. While, on the outside, Honey Don’t! had all the makings of a hit, audiences and critics weren’t particularly excited about the latest to come from one half of the greatest directorial pairings in history.
Honey Don’t! is now streaming in select countries on HBO Max.
