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The Guardian - Peter Bradshaw | Screenrush Barometer:  |
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'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.' |
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Time Out - Ben Walters | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'Established religion offers Larry little consolation but the idea of faith, or at least good living, that emerges from his struggle matches the sensibility the Coens have unobtrusively espoused throughout their work: reject worldly status, bear trials with humility, find joy in fellow-feeling. Bad things happen to good people. To acknowledge - even, as storytellers, to embrace - this fact is not to indulge in nihilism, but to make more urgent the social task that might mitigate its effects. You better find somebody to love.' |
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Empire - Dan Jolin | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'Admirably low-key, deeply compelling and their warmest movie since Fargo.' |
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Times on Line - Wendy Ide | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'The Coen brothers at their best, wringing a sacrilegious amount of gallows humour from the trials of a latterday Job.' |
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The Financial Times - Leo Robson | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'another impudent and exquisitely engineered comedy' |
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Times on Line - Kevin Maher | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'bracing' |
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New York Times - A.O. Scott | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'like "No Country for Old Men" and "Burn After Reading," fundamentally a shaggy dog story. But while it is funnier than either of those movies, it also has more gravity to it. This is not just because it represents something of a homecoming for the brothers, who grew up in the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. They are hardly the kind to be sentimental about the old neighborhood. But in that milieu their smart-alecky nihilism feels authentic rather than arch ? you understand, maybe for the first time, where they are coming from.' |
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Evening Standard - Derek Malcolm | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'There's no real answer given, but then the Coen brothers have never been known as philosophers. They are, however, pretty smart film-makers.' |
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The Daily Telegraph - Sukhdev Sandhu | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'A Serious Man, whether by accident or design, feels like a scratchier, more personal, less goofy version of the Coens' aesthetic than they've revealed before. Here's hoping their films get even more truculent in the future.' |
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Time - Richard Corliss | Screenrush Barometer: |
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'To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.' |
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