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100It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.
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100It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.
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90With 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.
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80Brilliantly scripted and full of a virtual Who's Who of familiar faces, The Big Lebowski is yet another golden hunk of totally unique celluloid from the versatile Brothers Cohen.
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80Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.
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80The 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."
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75Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.
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75Viewers with a taste for bizarre, even surreal, humor will have a ball.
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75This 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.
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75It's a pinball arcade of a flick -- the Coens invent a bunch of wonderfully flaky characters, stick them into a Plexiglas narrative, and let them bounce off each other.
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It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself.
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70Spiked 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.
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70The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.
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67Nearly 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.
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An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero.
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60This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence.
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60Frothing from two mouths, they parody film noir, megaviolent thrillers, sports allegories, ravaged-war-veteran movies, existentialist Westerns, even Busby Berkeley musicals.
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60The great flaw in most of the Coens' work is, surprisingly, an inability to sustain a plot over a two-hour span.
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50Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.
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It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".
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The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie's core, but in the end there's no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.
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30If it's all supposed to be in fun, why does it feel so much like an insult?