Rolling Stone
"...Spare, resonant and astonishingly beautiful....A jewel of a gangster film..." 10/04/1990 p.50Sight and Sound
"...MILLER'S CROSSING assumes a precision of correspondence between content and form which is all to rare in the cinema today..." 09/01/1990 p.64-5 USA Today
"...The film is a primer in screen virtuosity....Both film and actors somehow manage to seem realistic and stylized at the same time..." -- 4 out of 4 stars 09/21/1990 p.6D Film Comment
"...MILLER'S CROSSING is a stately and respectful genre treatise....Joel and Ethan Coen are meticulous filmmakers....It's filled with a great deal of beauty, skill, and a kind of ironic truth..." 01/01/1991 p.54-8 Los Angeles Times
"...[An] elegiac, stylish gangster movie....It has somber, poetic images and an especially fine musical score that braids its Irish themes together hauntingly..." 10/19/1990 p.F1 Total Film
"...This is the most elegant, most forceful and -- arguably -- simply the best film the Coen brothers have yet produced..." 11/01/2003 p.126 Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
Miller's Crossing comes from two traditions that sometimes overlap, the gangster movie of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s. It finds its characters in the first and its visual style in the second, but the visuals lack a certain stylish tackiness that film noir sometimes had. They're in good taste. The plot is as simple as an old gangster movie, but it takes us a long time to figure that out, because the first half hour of the film involves the characters in complicated dialogue where they talk about a lot of people we haven't met, and refer to a lot of possibilities we don't understand. It's the kind of movie you have to figure out in hindsight. - Roger Ebert
| 
5
