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A Serious Man

The 21st Century’s 100 greatest films (BBC)

A Serious Man

2009

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick ...

6.1

23,532

Comedy. Drama A black comedy set in 1967 and centered on on Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a Midwestern professor who watches his life unravel when his wife prepares to leave him because his inept brother (Kind) won't move out of the house.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Deftly balancing bright comedy and bitter darkness, the Coens have come up with another uncomfortable masterpiece about a fraternal duo (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"'A Serious Man' isn’t perfect but it’s cathartic to see the Coens finally show you a bit of who they are, or at least where they came from."	POS
United States	Todd McCarthy Variety	"This is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar"	POS
United States	Claudia Puig USA Today	"A dark comedy with a pervasive sense of unease (...) Underlying the grim humor are serious questions about faith, family, mortality and misfortune."	POS
United States	Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"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"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"Rich and funny (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of four)"	POS
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"If you’re expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don’t know the Coens (...) This seriously funny movie (...) is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune	"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'"	POS

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