The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

30. 1996 - Fargo

Fargo Frances McDormand
Gramercy Pictures

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.

 
Posted On: 
Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.