Coen Brothers: Ranking Their Films From Worst To Best

4. Barton Fink (1991)

Legend has it that the Coens suffered a mental block during the making of Miller's Crossing, so they took three weeks off to write another project. The entire script came together from start to finish inside those three weeks, and the following year the Coens put it into production. That project was Barton Fink, and it ended up being one of their tightest, weirdest and greatest films. John Turturro stars as meek but idealistic playwright Barton, enticed to Hollywood and the world of screenwriting after a successful stage production. He arrives in Los Angeles and stays at the Hotel Earle, and it's here that most of the film takes place. The Earle - which is, again, a building - has more character than most film protagonists played by actual people. The smoky lobby, the stupid palm trees, the patterned carpet, the thin walls and peeling wallpaper, the printed painting on the wall (above, behind Barton's head) - all of it feels stuck in time. But as good as Turturro is and as hypnotising as the halls of the Earle are, it's John Goodman's performance as Charlie Meadows/Karl Mundt that vaults Barton Fink into greatness. Goodman has played hundreds of characters in his lifetime (at the time of writing, he has a whopping 137 acting credits to his name on IMDb), and while Walter Sobchak and James P. "Sulley" Sullivan are certainly memorable, Meadows/Mundt is something else. Like the greatest of creations from the Coens, his character defies logic but begs interpretation and analysis - this dichotomy is at the heart of Barton Fink and, by extension, at the heart of all fiction writing.