Miller’s Crossing 07/02/22

Feature number three for the Coen Brothers is an eccentric gangster saga with a wonderful slate of mugs — Gabriel Byrne, John Turturro, Albert Finney, Jon Polito, J.E. Freeman, Steve Buscemi — slinging highly entertaining hardboiled dialogue. The witty, insightful story is at heart not a comedy, and the direction impresses in the formal sense — no superfluous camera acrobatics this time. Barry Sonnenfeld’s visual stick in the mind — the Byrne-Turturro execution scene in the woods is one of the highlights of 1990s filmmaking. On Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
07/02/22