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100Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.
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100The fans of their best work -- "Blood Simple, "Raising Arizona," "Barton Fink" -- now can add Fargo to the list, pushing the Coens to the first rank of contemporary American filmmakers. [8 March 1996, Friday, p.B]
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100A crime gem that is darkly funny even when it's chilling -- and certain to become a classic.
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100It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.
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100Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.
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100Fargo is a concert performance--an illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought. It glimpses into the heart of man and unearths a blackly comic nature, hellishly mercurial and selfish, yet strangely innocent. If it weren't so funny, it would be unbearably disturbing.
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100As gruesome as Fargo is, the Coens keep us laughing with a Hollywood-centric view of middle America.
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90The Coens are masters at striking a tone and holding it.
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90For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.
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90In the darkly humorous Fargo, iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen manage the precarious balancing act of respecting genre conventions and simultaneously pushing them to an almost surrealistic extreme. Very funny stuff.
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90Frances McDormand enjoys the comedic role of her career.
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90The brothers, who have always seemed fond of their characters, have never taken quite so overt a stand for life's simple joys.
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89An immersion into the characters' world in toto, from the "Oh geezes" and the "Oh, yaahs" to the dark and flinty core beneath.
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88The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.
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80This mordant, macabre look at the American obsession with fast food, television and murder is icily funny.
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80With the perfect assist from their actors, all of whom are well in on the joke, this affectionate look at the frozen North brings the Coens back in from the cold.
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80The Coen brothers wrote McDormand’s role best. Much of the time they seem to have had “Pulp Fiction” in their ears--strings of incongruous banalities; but with this pregnant cop, they struck some gold of their own. [March 25, 1996]
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80What mainly registers is the quiet desperation and simple pleasures of ordinary midwestern lives, the fatuous ways that people cover up their emotional and intellectual gaps, and the alternating pointlessness and cuteness of human existence. This may be a masterpiece of sorts, but it left me feeling rotten.
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75Lean, mean and mordant black comedy.
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75It's easy to admire what the Coens are trying to do in Fargo, but more difficult to actually like the film.
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70Uniquely fascinating.
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60Born and raised in Minnesota, the Coens know their targets well and generally hit them squarely.
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50To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.
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40All attitude and low aptitude.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 41
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Mixed: 3 out of 41
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Negative: 4 out of 41
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