Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen; Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Stephen Root, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Brendan Gleeson. Cert 15, 133 mins.

The new Coen brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, was originally meant to be a multi-part television series comprising six offbeat tales from the old American west. But at some point earlier this year, the project morphed into a standalone anthology film, of the type that flourished in the 1960s and 70s.

As a result, cinema’s gain has been, well, TV’s gain too: the project was financed by Netflix, and will likely appear on the streaming service at some point in the coming months, following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belie a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keep the viewer perpetually off-guard.

All six stories are presented explicitly as fictions – successive chapters in a dusty, cloth-bound tome, each of which is introduced by a colour illustration that gives away (or does it?) one of the section’s defining images. Part one – The Ballad of Buster Scruggs itself – is a gonzo send-up of the now cataclysmically uncool singing cowboy genre, previously dabbled in by the Coens in Hail, Caesar!, their 2016 satire of classic Hollywood.