Fargo

A film set in Minnesota in winter. Jerry is a sales manager at a car dealership. He is in debt and cannot ask his father-in-law for money. He makes a plan. Two men will take his wife, the father-in-law will pay the ransom, and the money will be split. The abduction happens and goes wrong immediately. A policeman stops them on the road, one of the men shoots him, and kills two passers-by as well. From there the film becomes an investigation. Marge is the town's chief of police, seven months pregnant, and comes to the scene early in the morning. Marge works calmly. She presses nobody, does not raise her voice, and asks the right question. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but disproportion: the film shows how a small lie turns into several bodies, and tells it with dry humour. The scenes between Marge and her husband are the narrative's counterweight. Nothing big happens to anyone, and the film implies that this is a good life. The speech is its signature. The regional accent and the constantly repeated polite formulas are set against the violence on purpose. The film states at the start that it is taken from a real event. That is not true and the directors later admitted it; the note was put there to hold the audience to the story. Frances McDormand won an Academy Award for the part; the screenplay won as well. Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are in the cast. Joel and Ethan Coen directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes dry humour and cold crime narrative. Who it is not for: anyone disturbed by sudden violence; the film turns hard in the middle of calm scenes.