The answer my friend is a hat blowing in the wind.

The Coen brothers craft a loving homage to gangster pictures of yore with splendid results. Essentially the plot has Gabriel Byrne as a good - bad guy caught between two rival gangster factions. It's a standard story line that is still providing cinematic water for many a film maker these days, but shot through the Coen prism, with literary astuteness holding court, it's a genre piece of considerable class. A picture in fact that gets better and better with further viewings.

When the Coen's are on form they have the skills to make a grade "A" thriller and blend it with a sort of dry irony. It's like they bite the hand that feeds whilst praising said genre influences to the rafters, but it works as damn fine entertainment. On a narrative level Miller's Crossing molds the Byzantine with the labyrinthine, keeping the complexities just on the right side of the street from that of art for arts sake.

Visually the film is superb, the hard working sweat of the city dovetails impudently with the mother nature beauty of Miller's Crossing the place, a place home to misery, a witness to the dark side of man. All the while Byrne, Albert Finney, John Turturro and Jon Polito bring an array of characterisations to the party, each one his own man but each craftily proving the folly of man. Marcia Gay Harden, in one of her first mainstream roles, slinks about making the two main boys sweaty, and wonderful she is as well. While Carter Burwell provides a musical score that has a smug (in a good way) self awareness about it.

Style over substance? Yes, on formative viewings it is. But go back, look again, see and sample what is not being said. Pulpers and noirers will I'm sure get the gist. 8/10

Gabriel Byrne is "Reagan", the enforcer for the pretty ruthless mob kingpin "Leo" (Albert Finney). He is caught in the middle of a battle between his boss and the man who would take his place "Caspar" (John Polito) over the antics of a rogue bookie "Bernie" (the scene-stealing John Turturro) who also happens to be the brother of "Verna" (Marcia Gay Harden) - the girlfriend of Leo, oh - and the mistress of "Reagan" too. "Reagan" tries to be a bit of an honest broker between them all, but when his efforts fail, he is cast aside by his former boss and left to fend for himself... On the face of it, this is just a run-of-the-mill gangster film. People are killed and the vicious circle of revenge continues. Quite cleverly, though, the Coen brothers have done quite a bit to present more complex characters and to give the plot a little more quirkiness - and that makes this an interesting two hours to watch. Finney's accent is a bit hit or miss, and I'm afraid Byrne just isn't a strong enough actor to carry his substantial part so well - he is no Edward G. Robinson or George Raft, but this is still a superior delve into the murky world of organised crime that does bear watching.

I'd been meaning to see this for a long time, even before the advent of Netflix streaming, and it sat in my queue for what had to be multiple years. I finally watched it, driven primarily by my recent need to see something that wasn't as brick stupid as the Transformers movies I tried to watch. Now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long.

"Miller's Crossing" is yet another well written, shot and directed Coen Brothers film. I've never seen anything that they've produced that I haven't loved or at least not really liked. Everything is so well done. Gabiel Byrne, Albert Finney and John Turturro are all so good. The dialogue is spot-on and the cinematography is beautiful. Watching this reminded me of the old gangster movies of the past, which I'm sure was part of the Coen's point. There was so much double-crossing, so many mob hits, and pointless gangster violence...it was great.

The only shortcoming I had with the film is the ending which was a little too open-ended. I normally like endings where we don't have all the answers but I liked these characters too much to have to fill in so many of the blanks.