"You can't make this stuff up, I dare you to try"

Rating: 8/10 (20 November 2012)

Masterpiece - "the most outstanding work of a creative artist or craftsman"...
Although this film is creepy, intellectual, offbeat, deliberately divisive, artistically adventurous, engaging, and decisively dreamlike, it is not a masterpiece or anywhere near the Brothers best film. That be Miller's Crossing (1990), possibly their true masterpiece.
This is an always interesting character study where the villain is undoubtedly worthy of clinical deconstruction and is awe inspiring and captivating, but the movie is needlessly confusing and constructed by design to be an unsettling, relentless non linear expose of the despair and disappointment in the devolving descent of the human condition.
However, it may be too layered and too unclear for it to be ultimately satisfying. It delivers some home spun prose about the inner mind of straight and stalwart people caught in this web of modern criminal behavior that pushes the oldsters off the cliff, but not before some sadistic torture.
There are some darkly funny and cynical quotable lines one expects from the Coen's and when this movie works it presents some new and fresh carnage that raises the hackles and chills the spine. It is a Neo-Noir of nihilistic novelty that is very good, but can be a frustrating and an overall disappointment if one is expecting this film to be a classic. It is more like classic Coen's than a classic movie.