With “A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen reached back into their past and deep into their souls to deliver something so personal that it could only become universal.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Apr 11, 2025

It is as if the Coen Brothers are suggesting that the meaning of life is not in the answers that the story provides, but the immersion and joy of the story.

| Jan 4, 2025

The Coens are some of the most interesting directors to ever explore Biblical dynamics in their movies, and A Serious Man is easily one of their best.

| Feb 22, 2024

A tremendously complicated, intelligent, and intriguing motion picture, and arguably the Coen brothers' best, A Serious Man is curious as a narrative but wholly momentous as a parable.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 20, 2022

I loved the Tale of the Goy's Teeth. This parable is worth the (exorbitant) price of admission.

| Sep 13, 2021

The last shot alone is so moving, so incredible and complex in its impact, it sears itself into your brain like the twin ghost girls in The Shining, and you go home stunned.

| Mar 22, 2021

This has big "we just won the Oscar, pay us" energy, and leave it to the Coens to go even bleaker at their great moment of triumph.

| Dec 8, 2020

In possibly the funniest and yet most commandingly philosophical film in the Coen Brothers' distinct oeuvre, the mischief kicks off inside the head of a 13-year-old Jewish pothead.

| Jun 18, 2020

A Serious Man may be the hardest of sells for the Coens, but it is the most worthy too: painfully comic, rueful to its core, and capable of leaving Coen fans giddy with the sense that they have returned to form.

| Jan 23, 2020

Although it may be small in scale, from the cast of unknowns to the claustrophobic suburban locale, it's big in terms of script, performance and impact.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 28, 2019

The movie develops into a pretty good rabbi joke about the meaninglessness of the universe.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 25, 2019

By the time A Serious Man ends in a stunner of a conclusion, the Coen Brothers have once again pulled off a magic trick, forcing us to search for meaning in a series of scenes that possibly exist as abstractions only to obfuscate a lack of depth.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 11, 2019

Drawing upon the biblical Book of Job, A Serious Man is easily the most Jewish film that writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen could make.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 3, 2019

The Coens' humor cuts deep, and A Serious Man is ultimately something quite beautiful.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 7, 2019

Does have its delicious moments and Michael Stuhlbarg does give an excellent, exasperated, frazzled lead performance... But without any warmth or expansiveness it all seems too cruelly easy and shrivelling somehow.

| Aug 30, 2018

As funny, heartbreaking, questioning, trying, exasperating and sincerely inquisitive a portrait of the human condition as you'll find on screen.

| Feb 4, 2018

The entire script is a mishmash: funny, droll, and anxiety producing, just like daily life in many Jewish families.

| Jan 17, 2018

See this movie for a good laugh, and know that no matter what's going on in your life, A Serious Man proves things can certainly get worse.

| Original Score: B | Sep 11, 2017

It's methodical, distancing and sarcastic, like all of their movies. And like all of them, it's exciting cinema, "eminently watchable," as one of its characters would say.

| Jun 1, 2015

This might be the Coen Brothers' best film. I suspect they think so too. Even if you sense they can't quite grasp what they've stumbled across here, and surely don't want to.

| Original Score: A | Jun 22, 2013