| Circle Films | Release Date: January 18, 1985 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
30
Mixed:
2
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
For a change, we're in a privileged position, always knowing more than the characters we're following, understanding their wrong-headed thought processes, appreciating the ironies they miss, seeing where a slightly different bit of behaviour would have saved lives or led to happier endings.
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The brothers instantly demonstrate their knack for coaxing beautifully offbeat performances from their actors, too; Walsh in particular is delectably sleazy, speaking his lines in a sneering Texas drawl that makes every word sound as if it’s turned rancid. And then there’s Carter Burwell’s score—his very first—which lacks the grandeur of his orchestral work in later Coen films like Fargo, but manages to evoke a palpable sense of dread with a simple piano theme. Insofar as their name signifies an aesthetic, the Coen brothers were fully formed right from the get-go.
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It's like watching Alfred Hitchcock try to solve a Rubik's cube in a roadside diner.
Filled with wonderful performances, especially by Hedaya and Walsh, Blood Simple remains a tight, beautifully ugly, neo-noir classic.
Savor their technique and the sizzling performances of Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her vengeful husband and M. Emmet Walsh as a private detective from hell.
Blood Simple becomes a dazzling comedie noire, a dynamic, virtuoso display by a couple of talented fledgling filmmakers who give the conventions of the genre such a thorough workout that the result is a movie that's fresh and exhilarating (in the way that Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” was).
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It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.
This is not an inspirational drama about finding yourself; it's a Hitchcockian comedy about adultery, murder and losing a corpse.
Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, Blood Simple is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way.
It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.
It’s so derivative that it isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes. The director, Joel Coen, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Ethan, who was the producer, is inventive and amusing when it comes to highly composed camera setups or burying someone alive. But he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the actors; they give their words too much deliberation and weight, and they always look primed for the camera. So they come across as amateurs.
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