Serious Man, A

Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf

See this film immediately.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

May not have the starry casts of the Coens' more recent films, but it has plenty of heart and soul.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

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

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

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.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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.

Slate Dana Stevens

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.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Calvin Wilson

A comedy of discomfort -- and one of their (Coen brothers) best, most insightful and most provocative films.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

That song (Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love), which becomes a sort of mantra to the movie, is the key to understanding what the Coens are after: When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, you better find somebody to love.

Empire Dan Jolin

Admirably low-key, deeply compelling and their warmest movie since Fargo.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It’s a story that begins in an ancient riddle and ends, perfectly, in the rumble of an oncoming storm. It’s about life, A Serious Man is, and it’s as close, I think, as any American narrative movie of recent vintage has come to touching on the uncanniness of it.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

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."

New York Magazine David Edelstein

A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

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.)

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

It is rich with ideas and contemplations and packed with the sort of existential jokes that tickle the Coen boys so.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

USA Today Claudia Puig

A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The presence of so many low-key performers gives A Serious Man a very different, distinctly non-Hollywood vibe. The absence of familiar faces allows the Coens to fully immerse their audience in the time (1967) and place (the U.S. Midwest) of the story.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

I found this beautifully crafted movie to be frequently hilarious, consistently surprising and rigged with spring-loaded narrative bombs, from its opening scene to its devastating final shot.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

The always surprising Coen brothers have finally made a very serious movie with A Serious Man. It's about God, man's place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it's one of their funnier movies.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

May not be "Fargo," but it nestles comfortably somewhere beneath that masterpiece and "Miller's Crossing," yet far above such forgettables as "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty."

Time Richard Corliss

To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

A seriously black comedy. Black, because affliction and angst abound. Comic, because this rampant bleakness is presented as nothing more than an amusing bauble.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

Once again, the Coens' tale of the damned is damn funny.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Like the Coens’ protagonist in "The Man Who Wasn’t There," Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this one is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived.

Variety Todd McCarthy

One doesn't know how (auto)biographical any or all of this is, but there's a tartness to the telling of what amounts to a well-shaped series of anecdotes that bespeaks distant pain or, at least, wincing memory twisted into mordant comedy by time and sensibility.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

The only thing missing from the film -- which is frequently amusing but too bleak to be consistently laugh-out-loud funny -- is a genuine connection with its audiences, or at least those audiences not raised in 1960s Jewish suburbia.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

The humor is sharp and so are the judgments, which pile on until the characters are nearly suffocated under the weight of so much disdain.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie?

The New Yorker David Denby

A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.

Village Voice Ella Taylor

As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."