| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
The 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]
|
| 100 |
Dallas Observer
Arnold Wayne Jones
Fargo 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.
|
| 100 |
TNT RoughCut
Gabriel J.P. Goldberg
As gruesome as Fargo is, the Coens keep us laughing with a Hollywood-centric view of middle America.
|
| 100 |
Baltimore Sun
It'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.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A crime gem that is darkly funny even when it's chilling -- and certain to become a classic.
|
| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.
|
| 90 |
Mr. Showbiz
Richard T. Jameson
The Coens are masters at striking a tone and holding it.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Frances McDormand enjoys the comedic role of her career.
|
| 90 |
Variety
Leonard Klady
In 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.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
The brothers, who have always seemed fond of their characters, have never taken quite so overt a stand for life's simple joys.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
An immersion into the characters' world in toto, from the "Oh geezes" and the "Oh, yaahs" to the dark and flinty core beneath.
|
| 88 |
San Francisco Examiner
The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.
|
| 80 |
Film.com
This mordant, macabre look at the American obsession with fast food, television and murder is icily funny.
|
| 80 |
Chicago Reader
What 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.
|
| 80 |
Film.com
Shannon Gee
Performances are near-perfect.
|
| 80 |
The New Republic
The 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]
|
| 80 |
Film.com
Bruce Reid
I don't care if they made up the whole thing. Any five minutes of Fargo feels truer than the whole of, say, "Nixon."
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
With 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.
|
| 75 |
USA Today
Lean, mean and mordant black comedy.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
It's easy to admire what the Coens are trying to do in Fargo, but more difficult to actually like the film.
|
| 70 |
Film.com
Keith Simanton
Uniquely fascinating.
|
| 60 |
TV Guide
Born and raised in Minnesota, the Coens know their targets well and generally hit them squarely.
|
| 50 |
Salon.com
Laura Miller
To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.
|
| 40 |
Time
All attitude and low aptitude.
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