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100Like all the Coens' movies, "Man" is supremely self-aware and darkly, hellishly funny. It's also brilliantly written and acted to a fare-thee-well by an outrageously good cast.
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100Most of the way this ranks with the Coens' most immaculately crafted work. Cain would have loved its dreamlike chills, and so will audiences nostalgic for the movies of half a century ago.
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100The Coens' plotting, with its suspense and reversals, is a source of amazement and delight.
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100If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.
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100For all its long shadows and ominous atmosphere, this is a very funny movie -- as funny as the Coens' masterful "Fargo."
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91It's an entirely conceived work of art, dark and hopeless and maybe even callous, but glittering and wonderful in its determination and in its craft.
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90The Coens have resurrected a hardscrabble California of wooden porches and gravel driveways, of rolling, oak-wreathed hills and one-lane roads, and of a restless people whose meager dreams are wrecked the moment money, sex or a bottle get in the way. Never has the past seemed so familiar.
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90Steadily engrossing and devilishly funny, and, o brother, does it look sharp.
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90You could say a lot about the very satisfying The Man Who Wasn't There, but what's for sure is that no one but the deadpan, dead-on Coen brothers could have turned it out.
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90The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.
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90When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.
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88To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.
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83Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.
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80This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."
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80The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.
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80The Coen brothers tread into James M. Cain territory with The Man Who Wasn't There, but with less tasty results than either Cain or the Coens themselves at their best.
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80It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.
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78It's the best-looking film of the year, hands down, and Thornton is dazzling, a dull diamond in the gutter rough.
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75So assured and perceptive in its style, so loving, so intensely right, that if you can receive on that frequency, the film is like a voluptuous feast.
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75Has all the tense crackle of film noir and the molasses drip of irony that is the trademark of movie-making brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.
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75Once you get the joke and grasp the aesthetic they're after, it's fun, and it almost works on the steam of its clever plot mechanics.
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70What makes me respect The Man Who Wasn't There despite myself is the sense that the Coens want it to be about something that can't be described or defined.
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Not for them the straightforward spoof, but, instead, a slightly creepy desire to have it both ways -- to inject new life into noir, but also to laugh behind their hands at its antique solemnity, and to urge us to follow suit. [5 Nov 2001, p. 105]
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63As a whole, it's a bit of a mess, the work of bratty geniuses with talent to spare, but unsure of what -- if anything -- they're trying to say.
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63Despite its visual brilliance, its all-round cleverness, and the way it demonstrates a profound understanding of genre, the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There doesn't quite come off.
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63Lacks the requisite sense of dread.
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63The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.
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60Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.
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50It's clever, in a "dare you to name this hommage" kind of way, but it's fundamentally heartless and coldly hollow.
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40tThe resulting hodgepodge is a medley of the brothers’ favorite verbal and visual tics, making much noise and signifying nothing.
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40The Coens have a true feeling for the sleek surfaces of the genre, but they don't connect with its sordid, sexy undercurrent; that's why Crane is made to seem so passive.
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38Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.
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30Ordinary moviegoers, on the other hand, may wonder what they're supposed to feel, apart from bored.
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Positive: 18 out of 19
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Mixed: 1 out of 19
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Negative: 0 out of 19
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