Metacritic reviews

Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.

Uniquely fascinating.

Frances McDormand enjoys the comedic role of her career.

In the darkly humorous Fargo, iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen manage the precarious balancing act of respecting genre conventions and simultaneously pushing them to an almost surrealistic extreme. Very funny stuff.

The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.

This mordant, macabre look at the American obsession with fast food, television and murder is icily funny.

What mainly registers is the quiet desperation and simple pleasures of ordinary midwestern lives, the fatuous ways that people cover up their emotional and intellectual gaps, and the alternating pointlessness and cuteness of human existence. This may be a masterpiece of sorts, but it left me feeling rotten.

It's easy to admire what the Coens are trying to do in Fargo, but more difficult to actually like the film.

To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.

All attitude and low aptitude.