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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Man Who Wasn't There, The
USA Films


8.5

based on 33 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 25 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for a scene of violence

Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Adam Alexi-Malle, Michael Badalucco, Tony Shalhoub, and James Gandolfini

Set in 1949, this film from Joel and Ethan Coen is a tale of passion, crime and punishment, all presented in glorious black-and-white. (USA Films)

GENRE(S):	Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Joel Coen Ethan Coen
DIRECTED BY:	Joel Coen
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 16, 2002 Video: April 16, 2002 Theatrical: October 31, 2001
RUNNING TIME:	116 minutes, B/W
ORIGIN:	USA

Picked up three Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture (Drama). Also awarded for Best Director (tie with "Mulholland Drive"), 2001 Cannes Film Festival

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Like 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.

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Most 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.

100

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

The Coens' plotting, with its suspense and reversals, is a source of amazement and delight.

100

New Times (L.A.) Bill Gallo

For all its long shadows and ominous atmosphere, this is a very funny movie -- as funny as the Coens' masterful "Fargo."

100

Time Richard Schickel

If 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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It'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.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

You 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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.

LA Weekly Steven Mikulan

The 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.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The 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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Steadily engrossing and devilishly funny, and, o brother, does it look sharp.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

To 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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It'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.

Slate David Edelstein

The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The 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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's the best-looking film of the year, hands down, and Thornton is dazzling, a dull diamond in the gutter rough.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

So 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.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Has 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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Once 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.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

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]

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

What 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.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Despite 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.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Lacks the requisite sense of dread.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

As 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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's clever, in a "dare you to name this hommage" kind of way, but it's fundamentally heartless and coldly hollow.

Film Threat Saul Austerlitz

tThe resulting hodgepodge is a medley of the brothers’ favorite verbal and visual tics, making much noise and signifying nothing.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

The 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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Ordinary moviegoers, on the other hand, may wonder what they're supposed to feel, apart from bored.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.5 (out of 10) based on 25 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Yoon C. gave it an 8:
An effective aggregation of human drama with an occult cosmic sense of fate beyond our control, it exercises the conventions of noir but has the trappings of a paranoid sci-fi movie. If this movie goes beyond the usual noir formula it's from the premonition of deep murky cosmos underneath our soul, a dank sense of karma of a life born and destroyed, where human consciousness serves just as a glimpse into illusional reality. Is it Coens doing David Lynch? However, I can't shake off the feeling that the Coen brothers are, as usual, a bit too glib with this material, epitomizing filmschool sensibility and much too indebted to the styles of the past.

The Gilbert Mulroneycakes Affair gave it a 10:
This is the Coens' "Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back" - not in method, obviously, but in intent - they made it just to please themselves and their friends. Anyone wanting a leg-up into the weird parallel universe of the Coens: watch Fargo, Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona and Blood Simple before this one. Veteren Coenheads: if you haven't seen it, paddle yourself silly with a broom handle, then see it. Someone said (here in Britain) that it's their masterpiece. Well, for what it's worth, I reckon Fargo is still their stone-cold number one "masterpiece de tutti", but this has just overtaken The Big Lebowski (by a tissue paper) as their second-best flick, from the strange 3-D title sequence to the genuinely moving closing image. So, brilliant, but not for the uninitiated. Or twats.

Jamie W. gave it a 10:
Neo-noir at its best.

Ryan M. gave it a 10:
If there is anything wrong with "The Man That Wasn't There" it's the fact that it ends. One of the best movies of the year.

Javier K. gave it a 10:
Brilliant and amazing from the beginning to the end. Coen Brothers have made another unforgetable film, like all their films.

Jack J. gave it a 9:
Excellent story and well directed. Held my attention from beginning to end.

Brad B. gave it a 4:
Rivals "Barton Fink" for the title of least enjoyable Coen film. Stylish? Sure. But overly long without so much as a hint of a payoff.

Man Who Wasn't There, The USA Films

Man Who Wasn't There, The
USA Films