These quiet, well-educated brothers-Ethan a graduate of Princeton University, Joel a New York University grad-work in tandem as one of the most acclaimed contemporary moviemaking teams. Lifelong film buffs, their own movies are loaded with references to classic cinema-yet the Coens infuse their movies with a highly distinctive style and an individualistic, slightly skewed worldview. Their debut film, the Texas-based noir Blood Simple (1984), made them overnight sensations with critics (though the film was not a box-office success). It set a pattern for their subsequent work, both in its preference for style over substance, and its aloofness, which has kept the Coen movies from appealing to a wide, mainstream audience. Their hyperkinetic 1987 screwball comedy, Raising Arizona costarring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, and featuring the innovative camera work of Barry Sonnenfeld, won the brothers their best reviews (and biggest audience) to date. The elegiac gang ster drama Miller's Crossing (1990), which "borrowed" liberally from Dashiell Hammett's novel "The Glass Key," and Barton Fink (1991), a wickedly funny, surrealistic fable of Hollywood in the early 1940s (that earned unprecedented awards at Cannes for Best Picture, Director, and Actor), reasserted the duo's mastery of visual detail and almost operatic stylization-but, like their earlier films, failed to connect with moviegoers on an emotional level. The same might be said of their even more ambitious The Hudsucker Proxy (1994).