Big Lebowski, The

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

It'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.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

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.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

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."

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

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

Film Threat Merle Bertrand

Brilliantly 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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Viewers with a taste for bizarre, even surreal, humor will have a ball.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

It'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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

Dallas Observer Michael Sragow

It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself.

Variety Todd McCarthy

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

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.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence.

Slate Alex Ross

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

Newsweek Jack Kroll

Frothing from two mouths, they parody film noir, megaviolent thrillers, sports allegories, ravaged-war-veteran movies, existentialist Westerns, even Busby Berkeley musicals.

New York Magazine David Denby

An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero.

The New Yorker Daphne Merkin

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.

San Francisco Examiner Barbara Shulgasser

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

TV Guide Ken Fox

If it's all supposed to be in fun, why does it feel so much like an insult?