The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

30. 1996 - Fargo

Honourable Mentions: Lone Star, Mission: Impossible, Scream

The Coen Brothers may have burst onto the scene with eighties classics Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, but the duo is arguably synonymous with the following decade more than any other. Kicking things off with Miller's Crossing and wrapping it up with The Big Lebowski, the Coens strung together a series of hits that captured the indie-minded spirit of the decade, producing perhaps their greatest film, Fargo, in 1996.

Sardonic and cutting in the best of ways, Fargo is the Coens' unique brand of black comedy at its best - a snowy, sometimes cosy neo-noir populated by hopeless crooks and wholesome heroes, exemplified by pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson on one side (played by the always-brilliant Frances McDormand), and down-on-his-luck fraudster Jerry Lundegaard (a terrific William H. Macy) on the other. Add to that some wonderful turns from John Carrol Lynch, Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, and Fargo finds itself in contention as one of the best-performed Coen productions ever put to screen.

Oh yah indeed.