Taken as a whole, the essays in Coen offer a lively conversation (indeed, the contributors edited one another's essays, and several of the published texts contain helpful intertextual comments) about the ways in which filmmakers, audiences, and scholars all imagine interactions between film and religion. As a compilation of criticism on the Coen filmography, the collection organizes and reframes an expansive bibliography. As works of scholarship on religion, its essays imaginatively connect critical theory of religion with cinema studies scholarship, applied in clever and illuminating readings of the Coens' oeuvre.
-- The Revealer
...[ Coen] offers an unexpected number of insights beyond the Coens and their films.
This immensely readable work is a stunning success of eloquent writers tackling riveting topics. Each of the Coen brothers' movies, the hilarious and the harrowing treated in chronological order, receives careful critical analysis that sheds blazing light on the dark genius of these filmmakers.
-- Journal of the American Academy of Religion
A work that sets out in search of the Coens' cinematic soul and returns with a raft of compelling insights
-- Journal of Religion and Film
Structured in three 'acts', the collection presents three different ways in which the films of Joel and Ethan Coen view the study of religion. The Coens' own religiosity is not the central object of the study, but the light which each of the films in the Coens' canon shed on both the tasks and categories of religious inquiry.
-- Perspectives in Religious Studies
