Like William Preston Robertson’s The Big Lebowski, this is something of a lost cause. For, while the Coen brothers fair beg analysis - textural, contextual, whatever - sliding the critical scalpel in inevitably kills.

The sterility evinced here is as much editorial intention as translation from the original German. And the brief Coens interview is as slippery as ever. What remains are riffs on each of the eight features (properly including Raimi’s Crimewave), Georg Sessian’s extensive Looking For A Trail in Coen Country, complete credits, and 500 plus illustrations.

Essays on Blood Simple, Fargo and The Big Lebowski say nothing, while Ulrich Kriest’s Raising Arizona and Sabine Horst on the first great film, Miller’s Crossing, are really rather good. Brigitte Desalm’s thoughts on the densely ephemeral Barton Fink, fall somewhere in between.

The brothers are correctly identified as arch post-modernists, with David Lynch as a fellow traveller, but there’s also an effort to tar them with Kubrick’s brush - of taking popular genres 'in order to remove them from circulation once and for all'. Stanley’s cinema wants us to think The SF Movie, The Horror Movie, The War Movie have all been definitively stamped and filed. The Coens are not - at least obviously - so arrogant. Their films are too hermetic.

Which is why the whole is rather redundant. It throws up intriguing points - comparisons between The Shining and Fink; is Arizona a dream?; deconstructing the 'vertical, masculine' of The Hudsucker Proxy against Fargo’s 'horizontal, feminine' - but is too willing to ascribe meaning where none exists. The Coens are intelligent film-makers, but that doesn’t bestow significance at random. That’s why as many loathe Fink as love it. As Joel says: '(The films) are probably so hyper-realistic that they have nothing at all to do with reality'. A brave effort nonetheless.