A Serious Man
Focus Features | Release Date: October 2, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
88
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
32
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
I found this beautifully crafted movie to be frequently hilarious, consistently surprising and rigged with spring-loaded narrative bombs, from its opening scene to its devastating final shot. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.) Read full review
100
SlateDana Stevens
A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse. Read full review
100
New York PostLou Lumenick
May not have the starry casts of the Coens' more recent films, but it has plenty of heart and soul. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Have I mentioned A Serious Man is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny too. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy Burr
It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’ Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful. Read full review
100
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Like the Coens’ protagonist in "The Man Who Wasn’t There," Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this one is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin Wilson
A comedy of discomfort -- and one of their (Coen brothers) best, most insightful and most provocative films. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
That song (Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love), which becomes a sort of mantra to the movie, is the key to understanding what the Coens are after: When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, you better find somebody to love. Read full review
100
EmpireDan Jolin
Admirably low-key, deeply compelling and their warmest movie since Fargo. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter Bradshaw
Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once, this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing. The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers. Read full review
100
The GuardianAndrew Pulver
Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here. Read full review
100
Time Out
The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation. Read full review
100
VarietyTodd McCarthy
One doesn't know how (auto)biographical any or all of this is, but there's a tartness to the telling of what amounts to a well-shaped series of anecdotes that bespeaks distant pain or, at least, wincing memory twisted into mordant comedy by time and sensibility. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua Rothkopf
See this film immediately. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo." Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubNoel Murray
WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
It’s a story that begins in an ancient riddle and ends, perfectly, in the rumble of an oncoming storm. It’s about life, A Serious Man is, and it’s as close, I think, as any American narrative movie of recent vintage has come to touching on the uncanniness of it. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
It is rich with ideas and contemplations and packed with the sort of existential jokes that tickle the Coen boys so. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The presence of so many low-key performers gives A Serious Man a very different, distinctly non-Hollywood vibe. The absence of familiar faces allows the Coens to fully immerse their audience in the time (1967) and place (the U.S. Midwest) of the story. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia Puig
A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film. Read full review
80
TimeRichard Corliss
To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you. Read full review
80
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
May not be "Fargo," but it nestles comfortably somewhere beneath that masterpiece and "Miller's Crossing," yet far above such forgettables as "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty." Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The always surprising Coen brothers have finally made a very serious movie with A Serious Man. It's about God, man's place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it's one of their funnier movies. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
A seriously black comedy. Black, because affliction and angst abound. Comic, because this rampant bleakness is presented as nothing more than an amusing bauble. Read full review
70
Film ThreatMatthew Sorrento
Once again, the Coens' tale of the damned is damn funny. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie? Read full review
60
The New YorkerDavid Denby
A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through. Read full review
50
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
The humor is sharp and so are the judgments, which pile on until the characters are nearly suffocated under the weight of so much disdain. Read full review
50
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people. Read full review
50
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
The only thing missing from the film -- which is frequently amusing but too bleak to be consistently laugh-out-loud funny -- is a genuine connection with its audiences, or at least those audiences not raised in 1960s Jewish suburbia. Read full review
50
Village VoiceElla Taylor
As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry." Read full review
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