This essay is a film review about the movie Millers Crossing directed by the Coen Brothers. Its a movie about organized crime and the bosses at the helm of it.

In my modest opinion, the film "Miller's Crossing" is Ethan and Joel Coen's greatest achievement to date, even greater than Fargo and Oh Brother Where Art Thou. The only criticism I've heard of this film has to do with the "over-acting"--a criticism that has been directed at more than one Coen film. Admittedly, Coen screenplays read more like novels than movie scripts and are not always actor-friendly. The story starts with Tom (Gabriel Byrne), …

…Coens put into their films, and all their focused appreciation of genre conventions and rules, and all their efforts to turn their movies into ironic appreciations of archetypes in American fiction, they never got their formula so right as with Miller's Crossing. With its dialogue, plot and moral chaos mitigated by one hero's personal code, the film so transcends its self-scrutiny as a retro-crime thriller that it is a deserved classic in its own right.