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DVD Miller's Crossing
Arguably the best film by Joel and Ethan Coen, the 1990 Miller's Crossing stars Gabriel Byrne as Tom, a loyal lieutenant of a crime boss named Leo (Albert Finney) who is in a Prohibition-era turf war with his major rival, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). A man of principle, Tom nevertheless is romantically involved with Leo's lover (Marcia Gay Harden), whose screwy brother (John Turturro) escapes a hit ordered by Caspar only to become Tom's problem. Making matters worse, Tom has outstanding gambling debts he can't pay, which keeps him in regular touch with a punishing enforcer. With all the energy the Coens put into their films, and all their focused appreciation of genre conventions and rules, and all their efforts to turn their movies into ironic appreciations of archetypes in American fiction, they never got their formula so right as with Miller's Crossing. With its Hammett-like dialogue and Byzantine plot and moral chaos mitigated by one hero's personal code, the film so transcends its self-scrutiny as a retro-crime thriller that it is a deserved classic in its own right. --Tom Keogh
Judging by the reviews on this site, it appears that this is a lot of peoples favorite Coen brothers movies. One person in particular said that they could not find one thing wrong with this movie...Well, technically, that is true. As a movie, script, and as far as the acting it's pretty solid; but this does not mean it's perfect. It's not my favorite Coen brothers movie and I've seen a few
(Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Man Who Wasn't There, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and Intolerable Cruelty) but that's not to say that it's not a great movie. The movie stars Gabriel Byrne as Tom; the counselor and friend of gangster Leo (Albert Finney, "Big Fish"). Leo basically runs the town, but after they fall for the same woman (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden "Pollack") Tom is kicked out of the friends "circle." He then turns to Caspar (Jon Polito) a local gangster with a bad temper. John Turturro, in his best performance here, plays Bernie; the brother of Verna (Harden) who everyone wants dead. The movie is a little different from some of the Coen's other stuff; but you can still tell it's one of their films. Turturro and Byrne are absolutely fantastic in every aspect of their performances; the end is not really that surprising, but don't get me wrong...The movie is entertaining throughout.
A-
One of my favorite films
It difficult today to recall that, when this movie came out in 1990, a lot of critics panned it, calling the characters cartoon caricatures and the story stilted and unwieldy.
Now, 15 years later and in a time when its players -- Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro and Jon Polito -- have all made big names for themselves, we can look back on this as one of the Coen brothers most inspired and entertaining films. It is the equal, in my opinion, of "Fargo" and "Barton Fink" and way ahead of their drowsy comedies of recent years starring big budget players like George Clooney and Katherine Zeta Jones.
If you've never seen it, "Miller's Crossing" is a crossroads in the country near the unnamed city where Italian and Irish gangsters are duking it out for control. Gabriel Byrne's character is the linchpin between the warring groups, first as the top associate to Irish mob chief Albert Finney and, later, as part of Jon Polito's Italian mob after he seemingly switches allegiance.
But does he switch? You'll really be entertained trying to figure that out! You'll also be entertained by a number of miraculous scenes -- the best of which is Finney fighting off killers in his bedroom and putting some more out of action with one of the best machine gun scenes in film history to the tunes of "Danny Boy". You'll also get a great kick out of a shootout at a speakeasy and a scene with fighter "Drop" Johnson -- one of the greatest names a Hollywood character has ever had.
All this and America's best character actor, John Turturro, too!
I'm getting carried away with enthusiasm but I can't help it when I think of this worderful, offbeat yet terribly mainstream and entertaining mob movie. There's never been one like it and probably never will be one like it. Buy it, rent it or borrow it tongiht and see how much fun you can have for a couple hours with his group of madcap gangsters.
the cohens and gabriel byrne
this one, and Barton Fink are my favorite cohen brother movies. this movie from 1990 is fantastic gangster drama...with style to byrne.
A darkly comic ride, this intense and original 1991 offering from the Coen brothers (Fargo, Blood Simple) gleefully attacks the Hollywood system and those who seek to sell out to it, portraying the writer's suffering as a loony vision of hell. John Turturro (Miller's Crossing, Jungle Fever) plays the title character, a pretentious left-wing writer from New York City who is brought to 1930s Hollywood to write a script for a wrestling movie for palooka actor Wallace Beery. Fink thinks the job is beneath him, but his desire for acceptance gets the better of him, and he suddenly finds himself holed up in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles, where he is almost immediately afflicted with writer's block. Various distractions begin to enter his life, first in the form of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John Turturro - John Goodman Director(s): Joel Coen - Ethan Coen DVD Release Date: Released the 20 May 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The debut film of director Joel Coen and his brother-producer Ethan Coen, 1983's Blood Simple is grisly comic noir that marries the feverish toughness of pulp thrillers with the ghoulishness of even pulpier horror. (Imagine the novels of Jim Thompson somehow fused with the comic tabloid Weird Tales, and you get the idea.) The story concerns a Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) who hires a seedy private detective (M. Emmett Walsh) to follow his cheating wife (Frances McDormand in her first film appearance), and then kill her and her lover (John Getz). The gumshoe turns the tables on his client, and suddenly a bad situation gets much, much worse, with some violent goings-on that are as elemental as they are shocking. (A scene in which a character who has been buried alive suddenly... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John Getz - Frances McDormand Director(s): Joel Coen - Ethan Coen DVD Release Date: Released the 18 September 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave it to the wildly inventive Coen brothers (Joel directs, Ethan produces, they both write) to concoct a fiendishly clever kidnap caper that's simultaneously a comedy of errors, a Midwestern satire, a taut suspense thriller, and a violent tale of criminal misfortune. It all begins when a hapless car salesman (played to perfection by William H. Macy) ineptly orchestrates the kidnapping of his own wife. The plan goes horribly awry in the hands of bumbling bad guys Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare (one of them being described by a local girl as "kinda funny lookin'" and "not circumcised"), and the pregnant sheriff of Brainerd, Minnesota (played exquisitely by Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning role) is suddenly faced with a case of multiple murders. Her investigation is laced with... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Joel Coen - Ethan Coen - Jeffrey Schwarz DVD Release Date: Released the 30 September 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Blood Simple made it clear that the cinematically precocious Coen brothers (writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan) were gifted filmmakers to watch out for. But it was the outrageously farcical Raising Arizona that announced the Coens' darkly comedic audacity to the world. It wasn't widely seen when released in 1987, but its modest audience was vocally supportive, and this hyperactive comedy has since developed a large and loyal following. It's the story of "Ed" (for Edwina, played by Holly Hunter), a policewoman who falls in love with "Hi" (for H.I. McDonnough, played by Nicolas Cage) while she's taking his mug shots. She's infertile and he's a habitual robber of convenience stores, and their folksy marital bliss depends on settling down with a rug rat. Unable to... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Joel Coen - Ethan Coen DVD Release Date: Released the 03 August 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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For all of its late-1940s cold war paranoia, pulp fiction dialogue, and frenzied greed, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There is their most cool and collected film since Blood Simple. An unassuming barber with a scheming wife (Frances McDormand) and a serious smoking habit, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is an onlooker to his own life, a ghostly presence set against a silver-toned film noir backdrop. Only when he decides to alter his fate by blackmailing his wife's lover (James Gandolfini) in order to invest with a traveling salesman (Jon Polito) touting the wave of the future--dry cleaning--do we begin to hear the full extent of Ed's understated, existential lament. As his lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) says in Ed's defense at his eventual trial for murder, "He is modern... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Billy Bob Thornton - Frances McDormand Director(s): Ethan Coen - Joel Coen DVD Release Date: Released the 01 October 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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