Minneapolis Miller's Crossing

Movie Showtimes

Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
Release Date: 12/31/1969
Running Time: 115 mins
Director: Joel Coen
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Jon Polito, J.E. Freeman
Producer:
Writer: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Distributor:
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Box Office

2012, 65.2 mil, 65.2 mil
Disney's A Christmas Carol, 22.3 mil, 63.3 mil
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, 5.9 mil, 8.7 mil
Men Who Stare at Goats, 5.9 mil, 23.0 mil
Michael Jackson's This Is It, 5.1 mil, 67.2 mil
The Fourth Kind, 4.6 mil, 20.4 mil
Couples Retreat, 4.2 mil, 102.0 mil
Paranormal Activity, 4.0 mil, 103.7 mil
Law Abiding Citizen, 3.8 mil, 67.2 mil
The Box, 3.2 mil, 13.2 mil

Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Miller's Crossing

A measured, ironic Ph.D. thesis on Dashiell Hammett and film noir, this 1990 film by Joel and Ethan Coen boasts Caravaggio lighting, a stately tempo, and a quietly immodest approach to its own mastery. Like David Lynch turning noir icons into the human haircuts of Lost Highway, the Coens arrange their glossed-up B movie archetypes--including the stoically hard-boiled young hoodlum (Gabriel Byrne) who comes between his boss (Albert Finney) and the boss's girl (Marcia Gay Harden)--in compositions that suggest a state funeral for Stanley Kubrick. The set pieces suggest a close study of spaghetti Westerns, but the prevailing mood--a long tommy-gun ballet set to "Danny Boy"--is gravitas all the way. (The brothers instructed their cinematographer to watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which wouldn't have been my choice.) Byrne and Harden manage only a flailing, TV-style flatness: For once, the Coens' casting instincts deserted them. And despite the intricacy and elegance of the plot, Miller's Crossing remains notable mainly as a warm-up for the siblings' subsequent triumph, Barton Fink, a movie as blazingly original as this one is mired in quotation marks. (Matthew Wilder) —