The Big Lebowski Critic Reviews

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.Read the full review

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens' earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996's "Fargo." Read the full review

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.Read the full review

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.Read the full review

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn't stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.Read the full review

Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.Read the full review

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.Read the full review

The great flaw in most of the Coens' work is, surprisingly, an inability to sustain a plot over a two-hour span.Read the full review

This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence. Read the full review