A unique alchemy seems to take hold on those sporadic occasions when the Coen brothers decide to get down with their ethnic roots.
Comment
12/16/09
A Serious Man (2009)
87
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:177
Fresh:154
Rotten:23
Average Rating:7.8/10
Consensus: Blending dark humor with profoundly personal themes, the Coen brothers deliver what might be their most mature -- if not their best -- film to date.
Rated: 15
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:20-11-2009
Synopsis: Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism - and intersections thereof - A Serious Man is the new... [More]
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, Richard Kind, Aaron Wolf
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Reviews for A Serious Man
The human comedy as portrayed in this film was never so cruel — or so funny.
11/27/09
This film is at once laugh-out-loud funny and deeply serious, troubling and satisfying, warm and bleak, both respectful of the Jewish heritage and mocking its restrictions and false comforts.
11/27/09
A Serious Man may be the Coens' most personal film, but the humour's too oblique to truly trouble the funnybone.
11/27/09
Admirers of the Coens – including those who have lapsed, like myself – will rejoice in their best film for a long while, and one of their most irreducibly oddball.
11/27/09
Admirably low-key, deeply compelling and their warmest movie since Fargo.
11/20/09
Top CriticThe film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation. Roger Deakins’s typically polished photography gives an oppressively hard edge to Midwestern suburbia.
11/20/09
Top CriticPossibly the brothers' most consistently amusing film since The Big Lebowski.
11/20/09
Top CriticA Serious Man represents the brothers at their sardonic best, wringing a sacrilegious amount of gallows humour from the trials of their latterday Job.
11/20/09
Top CriticEuphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once... The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers.
11/20/09
Top CriticA Serious Man, whether by accident or design, feels like a scratchier, more personal, less goofy version of the Coens’ aesthetic than they’ve revealed before. Here’s hoping their films get even more truculent in the future.
11/20/09
Top CriticFor proof of comedy and tragedy’s close relationship, watch this. Larry is essentially having a nervous breakdown yet it’s the Coens’ most humanely funny script in years.
11/20/09
It's challenging, only if you want it to be. The secret to enjoying it, like life, is not to obsess over the bits that don't appear to make sense.
11/20/09
A bold, unique, exquisite gem.
11/20/09
The Coen brothers most personal film to date, a typically shkrewy look at Jewishness that smartly nails the ticky-tackiness of American suburbia in 1967.
11/20/09
A complex, non-commercial Coen film that strips back the stars for an absorbing, affectionate look at the Bros’ youth.
11/20/09
A Serious Man feels – initially, at least – like a return to an earlier kind of filmmaking for the Coens.
11/20/09
There’s no real answer given, but then the Coen brothers have never been known as philosophers. They are, however, pretty smart film-makers.
11/20/09
Rigorously controlled, perhaps at the expense of a little emotional light and shade, this is one of the Coens' subtlest films. Expect smiles, grimaces, a slightly furrowed brow, and, finally, a feeling of satisfaction.
11/20/09
To me, and I suspect the mass of the cinema-going public, it feels nasty and pointlessly vindictive. There's a hole in the middle of this movie, where a modicum of empathy and humanity ought to be.
11/20/09
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