Cinema is a collaborative medium, and as such, there have been numerous directing teams peppered throughout film history. As with any collaboration, there's no guarantee that the band will be together forever, and sometimes the teams do indeed split up. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, underwent such a creative breakup around the beginning of this decade, with both men moving on to make their own movies without each other. Unlike some creative split-ups, however, the Coens post-breakup works couldn't be more different from one another. Where Joel made 2021's "The Tragedy of Macbeth" an austere, intensely moody Shakespeare adaptation that recalled Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ethan teamed up with his wife Tricia Cooke to make "Drive-Away Dolls," a mash-up of B-movie tropes (homaging everything from "Badlands" to '60s psychedelia flicks) that retained the Coens' prior interest in dry humor and film noir.

Upon the release of "Dolls,...