Suburbicon (2017)

The interesting part in George Clooney's sixth directorial effort, a black comedy based on a Coen Brothers' screenplay, is the desegregation happening in Suburbicon, a fictional suburb of the sort that popped up and spread, uniform and white, across the US in the 50s, but the moving in of the African-American Mayers family at the end of the decade and the ugly reaction of the locals (a situation apparently inspired by the experiences of a real-life 'Myers' family in Levittown, Pennsylvania) is just a broad context of questionable relevance to the Fargo nonsense of the plot - suburbanites get in over their heads in grubby crime - which reduces the more interesting context to just a hubbub that only serves to disguise a gunshot at one point late in the - yawn - story.

★★☆☆☆

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Barton Fink (1991)

After auterial success in New York, a playwright is snapped up by a film studio to work as a writer of a wrestling movie in Hollywood, but in this world of lucrative contracts, deadlines, and hothead studio bosses, the writer starts to question what's in his head, who it belongs to, how to get it out or keep it in and keep it unsullied, and whether anyone is interested, and it is perhaps this last question that the Coen brothers themselves might have thought longer about in relation to their unsympathetic Fink in their mean-spirited story full of motor-mouths.

★★★☆☆

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