Crime

“You always take the long way around to get what you want, don’t you, Tom?” asks Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) about halfway through Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers’ third feature. Tom (Gabriel Byrne), the closest thing the film has to a hero, only replies: “What did I want?” Like their leading man, the Coens tend to take the long way around, and most of the time, viewers come away from their films wondering what they wanted.