10 Most Essential Coen Brothers Films

Okay, we got to it, chill out—Yes, this one made it to the list at the expense of both Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, so our apologies to those two satirical indictments of consumerism and creative solipsism respectively.

But how could we leave this brutally bleak gangster film off a list like this?

Where other titans of American cinema such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese imagined the Mafia as tragic villains consumed by an operatic ballet of violence or ineffably cool antiheroes whose amoral antics are hard not to admire, the Coens turn to biblical simplicity for their pass at the gangster genre to great success.

A simple and heartbreaking story of an overplayed hand and the dangers of unchecked ambition, Miller’s Crossing is painfully cold and unsparing in its depiction of the inevitable cruelty of a “cops and robbers” criminal justice system in place since America’s wild west days, but strangely moving in its empathy for its godforsaken cast, and features an unforgettable central turns from Gabriel Byrne and John Turturro.