The Big Lebowski

For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must), yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo. Read full review

Immensely inventive and entertaining, the film may not have the enigmatic elegance or emotional resonance of Barton Fink or Fargo, but it's still a prime example of the Coens' effortless brand of stylistic and storytelling brilliance. Read full review

Apart from psychedelic dream sequences with a bowling twist, it's the wealth of great characters and their insane dialogue that make this a memorable film. Read full review

Magnificent. A multiplex-friendly critics' movie in the stripped-down Blood Simple/Fargo style, but with a more restrained hint of Raising Arizona slapstick. A crime-sex-drugs-kidnap-bowling-nihilism mystery of the highest order. Read full review

Anything goes in The Big Lebowski, and you roll right along with it. [6 March 1998, p.3]

So I'll just say this: The Big Lebowksi is an excellent movie - and damn funny.

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. Read full review

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

It’s a great performance from Bridges, and he seems weirdly young in this film, certainly compared to the brilliant craggy oldsters that later became his acting birthright. You can still see the boyish, vulnerable figure that he was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. One of a kind. [20th Anniversary] Read full review

A deliriously fractured film, ambitiously packed with bowling, bimbos and other great inspirations of latter-day thought. Closest in style and temperament to Raising Arizona, this Gramercy release should roll box office strikes with select-siters and score some winning spares with mainstream viewers. Read full review

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. Read full review

There are few films that genuinely get better with each successive viewing. The Big Lebowski is one of them. This is owed not only to its near-infinite quotability, which itself grows with time, given how much of the film’s humor is self-referential, but also because its tangled plot requires a substantial amount of unraveling before it can be fully understood and appreciated. Read full review

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." Read full review

So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl. Read full review

The Big Lebowski is the best movie ever set mostly in a bowling alley. Read full review

Though the Coens have a way, as ever, with a crime yarn (even a truly goofy one), it's their ability to create eccentrically affecting characters - and to devise unusual fantasy sequences that work as large-scale sight gags - that makes this movie such a quirky pleasure. [6 March 1998, p.L30]

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

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. Read full review

The Big Lebowski isn't quite up to the level of the Coen brothers' best films - "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "Barton Fink." But second-level Coen brothers can be funnier than first-level almost everybody else. [6 March 1998, p.D5]

Truth be told, Joel and Ethan's game is a little off, inconsistent and at times just plain incoherent. But they roll enough solid laughs and eye-tickling camera tricks to satisfy. [6 March 1998]

Perhaps only the committed Coen fan, however, can be entirely pleased with Sam Elliott's incongruous appearance as a Dude-worshipping character called The Stranger, or with the tired kidnapping plot, which plays like an unnecessary leftover from other Coen movies. For all its strong points, The Big Lebowski will have as many detractors as fans. [6 March 1998]

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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

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. Read full review

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

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

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. Read full review

Just a silly mess of a movie in which no one is trying very hard to do anything but goof off. [6 March 1998]

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. Read full review

Because it's by the Coens, The Big Lebowski is studded with visual and verbal jokes and flourishes, but ultimately they amount to pearls without a string. The Coens have thrown their considerable talents into making the world's smartest dumb movie, a dubious distinction that for their admirers will have to suffice, at least for now. Read full review

For those who enjoy the non sequiturs common to Cheech & Chong comedies and Raymond Chandler mysteries, The Big Lebowski is a hoot. For those of a more serious warp, the film is a lexicon of postmodernism, a textbook example of recontextualizing earlier styles, what with its '60s casualties driving '70s cars and enjoying '50s pleasures in the '90s. In other words, this is not a movie for those who demand narrative thrust and coherence, although even they will be startled by the contrast between Bridges' teddy-bear affability and Goodman's corrosive hostility. [6 March 1998, p.04]

Where Fargo was cool and wryly detached, the zany new film is aggressively antic - more like parts of their Barton Fink or The Hudsucker Proxy. On occasion, in fact, the Coens' anything-goes approach can begin to get on your nerves. [6 March 1998, p.17]

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

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

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

An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero. Read full review

They've never been farther into outer space than in The Big Lebowski. Fans (myself included) may cackle at absurd situations and in-jokes. But director Joel and producer Ethan, who write together, have never made so much clamorous ado about nothing. [6 March 1998, p.7E]

Unfortunately, The Big Lebowski doesn't hang together, and it's not supposed to: That's just the way the Coens want it. In some circles, this will be celebrated as the brothers' refusal to "sell out" after achieving Oscar glory. But anyone hoping for a real movie will see The Big Lebowski as nothing more than a pleasant waste of time. [6 March 1998, p.5G]

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

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

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. Read full review

I laughed out loud a few times during The Big Lebowski, and Jeff Bridges, as always, is very good, but after I write this review, I'll probably never think about the movie again. And I spend way too much time thinking about movies. Read full review

It's a tired idea, and it produces an episodic, unstrung film. [6 March 1998, p.49]

A letdown, another comedy that's strange for the sake of being strange. This one's a riff on detective movies. It has nothing to say but does take a long time to say it...the film plays like a bad inside joke. [2 March 1998]

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