A Serious Man Critic Reviews

It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’Read the full review

Have I mentioned A Serious Man is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny too.Read the full review

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.Read the full review

The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.Read the full review

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.Read the full review

WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.Read the full review

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."Read the full review

The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)Read the full review

A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film.Read the full review