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Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Man Who Wasn't There, The

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 29 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Romance
Written by:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Directed by: Joel Coen
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 31, 2001
DVD: April 16, 2002
Running Time: 116 minutes, B/W
Origin: USA
Summary
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)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Barton Fink Blood Simple: The Director's Cut Burn After Reading Fargo Intolerable Cruelty Miller's Crossing No Country for Old Men O Brother, Where Art Thou? Raising Arizona The Big Lebowski The Hudsucker Proxy The Ladykillers
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham
The Coens' plotting, with its suspense and reversals, is a source of amazement and delight.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Steadily engrossing and devilishly funny, and, o brother, does it look sharp.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Saul Austerlitz
tThe resulting hodgepodge is a medley of the brothers’ favorite verbal and visual tics, making much noise and signifying nothing.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.6 (out of 10) based on 29 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Jay H. gave it an8:
Beautifully made, great performances, outstanding black and white cinematography. Outstanding period detail, stylish and very engrossing throughout. Excellent direction.
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.
