Fargo: Critic Reviews

The Coens are at their clever best with this snowbound film noir.

Gunderson (Frances McDormand) [is] the most endearing, hilarious and wholly feminine heroine since Thelma or Louise.

Works like a charm. A really weird charm, that is.

To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them and made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe.

Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way -- defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.

Fargo is a strikingly mature, uniqueentertainment that plays on many levels ... all satisfying.

Like every other critic I'm aware of, I loved this movie.

Has a murder mystery, a heist gone wrong, tragedy, comedy, and well flushed out characters that are both simple and complex at the same time.

This mordant, macabre look at the American obsession with fast food, television and murder is icily funny.

Uniquely fascinating.

The danger in portraying characters you consider significantly less interesting than yourself is that too much superiority and not enough affection can lead to a fatal snottiness.

It's easy to admire what the Coens are trying to do in Fargo, but more difficult to actually like the film.

All attitude and low aptitude. Its function is to italicize the Coens' giddy contempt toward people who talk and think Minnesotan.

Chief Gunderson was created by the Coens specifically for Frances McDormand ... and they've been rewarded by a brilliant and unblinking comic performance.

Dark, gritty, and brilliant. Not for kids.

"Fargo" is the kind of black comedy you can rediscover over and over again. The laughs and shocks never fade.

Quite simply, Fargo is the best movie the Coen Brothers have ever made. And that's saying a lot.

The most complete film the Coens have ever made, it's nothing short of a movie for the ages.

The Coen Brothers have always loved to go far, a tactic they don't forgo in Fargo. [Blu-ray]

Do you have to be a Minnesotan to really get Fargo?

The best movie heroine in years.

This may be the warmest movie the Coen brothers have ever made.

[Marge is] a good cop because everything abnormal stands out like a stain against her white-on-white sanity.... [H]er incomprehension [of criminality] is not only her strength as a detective, it justifies the deadpan style of the movie.

Much less vain, flamboyant, and showy than their other pictures, Fargo bears the thematic influence of Samuel Beckett and the stylish coolness of Finland's Aki Kaurismaki, but the violence is all Coens.

One of the more entertaining films of the 1990s.