The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

8/27/2026

Tim Blake Nelson turns in a Wild West version of "Alan a-Dale" as he plucks his minstrel's guitar and tells us an half-dozen tales of life in the pioneering United States of the late 1800s. His is the first of these stories, and serves to give us a clue as to the quirkiness of what's to follow from these stand-alone observations of a dog-eat-dog society as it emerges from it's civil war. Along the way, there are homages paid to both the plots of films like "Stagecoach" and to just about any of the actors who rode an horse, cracked a whip or slung a rifle. My own personal favourite has to be the ageing prospector (Tom Waits) who armed with his mule, his giant pans and what appears to be the mining equivalent of a divining rod, attempts to find a lucrative seam of gold from a seemingly rando