A very good movie

If you are a Coen fan, you ought to see this movie. The attention to the details, the weird characters, the dark humor, the slow tempo, it has everything and it is a very typical Coen flick. For the Coen brothers, it is when they really started to get serious. Indeed, ‘Blood Simple’ and ‘Raising Arizona’ were both pretty good and they both became eventually cult-classics but they were rather modest when you consider the scale and, with this flick, you could see that the two siblings were getting quite ambitious. Basically, it is a gangster flick with a rather slow pace but it is a great mix combining the Coen brothers directing style with the gangster-prohibition genre. Personally, each time I watch this flick, I enjoy it even more but, with its rather slow pace, I still believe it is an acquired taste. The cast was also pretty terrific with an all-time best performance by Gabriel Byrne but the rest of the cast was really solid as well (Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Albert Finney, Steve Buscemi). To conclude, even though this feature seems to be a little bit forgotten, I think it is actually one of their best movies and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in the Coen brothers’ work.

8/10