And they’re at their playful, potent best here, winning a deserved Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival. The writer-directors love toying with language, the formality and foolishness of it as a means of communication. (The R rating is no joke.) A poster, labeling our antihero a misanthrope, announces that Buster is wanted dead or alive. Varmints take bullets smack in the forehead as the Coens lay on the carnage.

This becomes clear when Buster enters an outlaw bar where no one will serve him whiskey or let him play poker unmolested. What he is, however, is a bit of a psycho killer. There’s not a Coen freak who would have it any other way. See this cinematic orphan in a storm however and whenever you can, and prepare to be intrigued, enthralled and maybe even infuriated. Luckily, the brothers have found a friend in Netflix, who are opening the wickedly wonky Western in a few theaters followed by a debut on its streaming service. And it is hard to imagine studio suits lining up to release an anthology oater in six non-connecting parts, with no big box-office prospects and no overriding theme except for the omnipresence of sudden death. In Hollywood, they call this kind of cinematic leap of faith a hard sell. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is like no horse opera you’ve ever seen - imagine Blazing Saddles as directed by Ingmar Bergman. Try Joel and Ethan Coen, those filmmaking brothers from the dusty plains of suburban Minnesota who are famously fearless about moseying down new paths.

Saddle up for a rowdy, rip-snorting, hilarity-and-hellfire western full of riding, fighting, hanging, shooting, gold prospecting and bloody massacres - plus silly songs, a limbless poet, cowboy love rituals and philosophical musings about the inevitability of dying.

The ballad of buster scruggs