Joel and Ethan Coen's back-to-back films Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink are ingenious tributes to genres and generations hence. Dashiell Hammett do-up Miller's Crossing channels the pulp stylist's smart, sidestepping plots in its variation on devotion and double-crossing. Gabriel Byrne plays loyal right hand and lover to Albert Finney's Irish mobster and his mistress (respectively), and must somehow save small-time bookie John Turturro from the opposing Italian gang. The deliriously symptomatic and self-commenting Barton Fink documents a blocked playwright (Turturro) and his comical interactions with Depression-era neighbors while debilitating dread accumulates over his unwritten studio script.