Miller’s Crossing (1990)

No, 90s cinema hasn’t exactly been well-covered here so far. Not that I’ve any prejudice against the decade in the way a lot of classic film buffs don’t seem to care about films made after a certain date, it’s just that, you know, I lived through the decade and saw a lot of films then on their first release. And basically I’m now wanting to explore those decades I didn’t get to examine at the time. Hence the predominance of older stuff here. Anyway, I missed this at the time; when I was 15 I neither knew nor cared who the Coen Brothers were, whereas these days I know without really caring an awful lot somehow. Of the six Coens films I’ve seen thus far, this is the one I’ve probably liked the best (possibly except for O Brother), in that I don’t seem to have as many reservations after watching it as I did after the others. With a plot taken from that fertile wellspring, Dashiell Hammett’s Glass Key, I was kind of struck by the feeling the film seemed to have for rooms with big empty spaces in them, and of course the spaciousness of the forest too; it’s a film of quite some visual style, and makes the most of its period  setting. And it’s perfectly well-acted, too. It’s just that the more I think about it (I watched it last night), the less I’m sure I particularly care about it for some reason.

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