8 Best Movies To Watch If You Love Fargo (That Aren't By The Coen Brothers)

Published Aug 29, 2026, 1:15 PM EDT Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more. Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor. He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre. To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net. The Coen Brothers have one of the most distinctive filmmaking styles in Hollywood history, and this has brought them great acclaim more than once, especially with their critically acclaimed 1996 masterpiece Fargo. This was the movie that helped the brothers break out from being cult filmmakers to actually earning award recognition, with Fargo earning seven Oscar nominations at the 69th Academy Awards. Fargo has all the Coen Brothers' tricks and traits, from weirdly named characters and a regional Americana location to a dark sense of humor and genuine existential absurdity. Fargo is about a man who has his wife kidnapped and held for ransom so he can get the money from her wealthy father to help save his failing car dealership. When people start to die, everything goes wrong. The dark humor added to the violence plays out in all the Coen Brothers' movies. Just like many other cult favorite film directors from the 1980s and 1990s, the Coen Brothers saw their style copied by other filmmakers, and it was the style​​​​​​, even more than the filmmakers, that became a huge selling point in Hollywood. However, many copycat movies fail because they don't have what made the originals so great, just aping the style instead. That said, here are eight movies that weren't made by the Coen Brothers but remain films that any Fargo lover should watch. Wind River (2017) Wind River doesn't have the dark humor or the weird characters that Fargo has, but it does share a similar landscape and is about a murder gone wrong. In fact, this movie, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone), is perfect for anyone who loves Fargo but wants something more serious. Just like Fargo, Wind River takes place in a snowy northern landscape as police investigate the death of a murdered Indigenous woman. The movie has a great cast, with Jeremy Renner as a tracker and Elizabeth Olsen as a young FBI agent. The film is also very important, as Sheridan made it to shine a light on the large number of Indigenous women who disappear or are murdered every year in cases that are never solved, and that are rarely even noted. Wind River also had a sequel made, but it has still never been released. Bottle Rocket (1996) A Coen Brothers movie is easy to recognize because of the weird characters, the eclectic dialogue, an off-kilter story, and the distinctive design of the movie. The same can be said of a Wes Anderson movie, and when looking specifically at Anderson's early career movies, it is easy to see a strong similarity between the Coen Brothers and Anderson's look at the myth of small-town Americana. Bottle Rocket is about two friends, one of whom escapes from a psychiatric hospital, who plan to pull off several heists to finally hit it big. However, just like in any Coen Brothers movie, like Fargo, nothing goes right, and the bumbling mistakes send their plans to imminent doom. Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson star in the movie, and their characters could easily live in any Coen movie, with a crime gone wrong that compares well with the scam in Fargo. The Ice Harvest (2005) Released in 2005, The Ice Harvest is a late-career movie by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) that is unlike anything the director had ever made before. The movie is similar to Fargo in that both are about a criminal plan that has almost no chance of going right. In this case, two men (John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton) are about to leave town after stealing $2 million from a local mobster (Randy Quaid). However, a snowstorm and icy roads force them to postpone their getaway as the mobster begins to close in on them. What really makes this comparable to Fargo, other than the snowy landscape, is the fact that neither thief can trust the other, and other people learn what happened and try to get a piece for themselves. It shares Fargo's double-crosses, and not everyone gets out of this movie alive. Shimmer Lake (2017) Shimmer Lake is a movie that remains highly underrated but deserves a much larger audience. This is a Netflix original neo-noir crime film written and directed by Oren Uziel in his directorial debut. The movie is strikingly similar to Fargo in that it takes place in a small town where a bank robbery leads to betrayals, tragic twists, and a series of deaths that never should happen, yet do, all in darkly humorous ways. The movie is also told in reverse order, with the final climax playing out and then the events that lead up to that moment being shown piece by piece as the puzzle is put together. The cast is spectacular, with Benjamin Walker, Wyatt Russell, Rainn Wilson, Rob Corddry, Ron Livingston, Stephanie Sigman, and more. The characters in Shimmer Lake could easily exist in a world like Fargo, and the dark comedy moments in this crime film seem highly influenced by the Coen Brothers. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) There is one big reason why Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, feels like Fargo. This is because both movies have Frances McDormand in the lead role, and both take place in small towns in rural America. McDormand won an Oscar for her performance in Fargo as the police officer investigating a murder, but her role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is different, playing the mother of a missing girl who feels the police aren't doing enough. The story is darker and more emotional than Fargo, but McDormand is a force of nature, the same as she was in Fargo, and here she is an angry woman who demands that a law enforcement agency that failed her stand up and do what needs to be done. McDormand and Sam Rockwell both won Oscars for their performances. A Simple Plan (1998) A Simple Plan is a movie that feels like a Coen Brothers movie for one big reason. Sam Raimi directed the movie, and Raimi was roommates and close friends with the Coen Brothers and Frances McDormand when all of them were rising up the ranks in Hollywood. A Simple Plan is the closest Raimi has come to making a Coen Brothers-style movie. The story is about two brothers who find $4.4 million in a plane crash, and it ruins their lives. Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton play the brothers, Jacob and Hank, while Bridget Fonda plays Hank's wife, Sarah. The snowy Minnesota landscape looks like Fargo, and A Simple Plan's tendency to ruin its main characters' lives in the most disturbing ways possible. The movie was also a success, with two Oscar nominations, including one for Thornton and one for Best Screenplay. In Bruges (2008) Martin McDonagh is a filmmaker who has mixed the filmmaking sensibilities of the Coen Brothers with his own unique brand of dialogue. He even won an Oscar for writing and directing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. While that movie is a dark and serious movie about an unsolved crime, In Bruges is more up the alley of the Coen Brothers when it comes to storylines. McDonagh directed In Bruges nine years before Three Billboards was released. Colin Farrell plays a hitman who is sent into hiding in Bruges to wait for further instructions after accidentally killing an altar boy when he is hired to kill a priest. What he doesn't expect is that his boss will order his mentor (Brendan Gleeson) to kill him to wrap things up. The result is a wild and comedic ride as the bullets begin flying around Bruges. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005) Shane Black has been one of Hollywood's best screenwriters for four decades, and in 2005, he wrote and directed a neo-noir dark comedy crime film. What resulted was a movie that remains one of Val Kilmer's best late-era movies and the film that helped Robert Downey Jr. start his Hollywood comeback that eventually led to his casting as Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the dialogue and script is similar to the work of the Coen Brothers and their critically acclaimed film, Fargo. Downey is Harry, a petty crook running from the police who wanders into a casting call for a movie and accidentally wins the role. He then teams up with a real PI played by Kilmer to learn the ropes and then ends up involved in a real murder mystery. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang remains one of the off-beat crime films of the 21st century.