L.A. noir as only the Brothers could conjure. One of the Cohen Brothers very best!

My new favourite movie

This film about a New York playwright who takes his talents to Hollywood at the invitation of a studio boss features some tremendously funny satire of Hollywood studio bosses and their studio boss philosophy. It also has some great jokes about screenwriters and their place in Hollywood. Alongside that, there is a very creepy, slow-moving plot about a seedy hotel, a serial killer, and writers block that takes practically the whole movie to go anywhere and where it goes is pretty weird. The film does well on setting, character, and off-beat humour, but the plot will satisfy some and dissatisfy some others.

John Goodman was great in this movie. It was all about screenwriting in classic Hollywood. The Coen brothers are great directors. It turns into a noir movie towards the end. Steve Buscemi was good too.

The Coen Brothers are at their best when it comes to their more slowly paced character studies like A Serious Man or Barton Fink. Barton Fink is one of the best films they ever made. It's a horrifying and thrilling study of the human mind and it's unpredictablility, with John Turturro giving one of the best lead performances I've ever seen. Expertly written and executed, this thought provoking thriller is one of the essential films of the Coens' careers.

The subject matter of this movie actually interested me more than I thought it would and the Coen brothers normally make awesome movies. John Turturro acts great, along with the supporting cast members who are the big Hollywood producers and writers. The film gets really interesting at a certain point when Mr. Fink wakes up next to a big surprise dead female body in his bed, which almost convinces you is a dream. John Goodman did well with his role too and his ability to make facial expressions that stand out, however I didn't like how they handled the closure of his character. I felt like they could've provided him with a better ending and one that was less ambiguous/made more sense. The very end of the movie with him on the beach though was a beautiful scene. I might rewatch it one day and I like and love other Coen brothers movies a lot better, but this works well enough!

Usually I like films by the Coen brothers, but this one was too unnerving for me, in a negative way.

The Coen Brothers add their slick signature to this surreal story of writer's block! Quirky one minute then macabre the next, we get hit in the gut by both barrels. Leaves us fascinated, but also a bit unsure of what the heck we just watched!

Wow - what a ride. For my money this is John Turturo at his finest. The existentialism decorated within the seemingly shallow storyline creates a spectacle that kept me on the edge of my seat. Call me Brad Pitt in 'Seven' because I was screaming "What's in the box?!?"

Not quite as good as some Coën Brothers films, but not bad. It sort of goes off the rails at some point, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

For those who said the movie is boring without a plot… I feel sorry for you. Because you entirely missed every message of this masterpiece

Packed full of the Coen's trademark biting wit and social satire, Barton Fink, only the 4th film they ever made, takes place during the height of World War 2, and follows an intelligent but doubt-ridden playwright who receives an offer to write movie scripts in Hollywood. The film has a firm basis in reality, as many prominent writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, wrote scripts in Hollywood, and largely detested the experience, seeing it as beneath them. As an aspiring writer myself, the film's themes of writer's block and trying to construct a story that just isn't taking shape really resonated, and John Turturro performance captures both the characters deep-seated anxieties, but also his aloofness and lack of compassion for the common man which he so exuberantly champions. It's a vicious satire on the Hollywood of the time period, but it might actually be even more resonant today. Film beings made purely for profit with a distinct lack of heart and soul, old ideas being dusted off, given a fresh lick of paint and being presented as original concepts, and scriptwriters being viewed as little more than machines churning out half-hearted scripts rather than human beings with a unique story to tell. There's a lot of symbolic elements that might baffle some viewers, but I never felt like you needed to understand them in order for the story to work, they're more like Easter eggs on that sense. If you're a Coen brothers' fan, then you'll be on Cloud 9 throughout. But even if you're not, Barton Fink still works as a (mostly) straight story that's easily accessible and highly entertaining.

Amazing, twisted, dark and funny view of a writer's block with fantastic climate and great acting by John Turturro and the rest of the cast.

Uninteresting movie about a guy who hadn't written a screenplay before, not being very good at it. What point was being made here?

Playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro), after receiving rave reviews for a recent Broadway success, accepts a lucrative offer to write screenplays for a Hollywood studio. However, upon arrival, he finds himself with a case of writer's block, trapped in an overheated hotel room filled with mosquitos, with the only hope of manifesting his Hollywood dream being a picture of a young girl at the beach that hangs from his wall. Directed by Joel Coen, it's a darkly humorous look at failed dreams. The script, written by the Coen brothers, is filled with sharp dialogue, intriguing characters and interesting scenarios. Cinematographer Roger Deakins bathes each scene in a sepia-like light, effectively capturing the feel of the 1940s. The only possible quibble one could have with the movie is the surreal scene involving the hotel fire at the end of the film, which feels a bit out of place, but it remains another finely etched film from the brothers.

Some funny comments from a few characters in this dream like world of a writer. Never a fan of the film industry genre and this started slow but then improved in the second half. Not sure if made much sense to me but it was ok. Early cameo from Steve Buscemi was noticeable but John Goodman owns the film.

Definitely will make you think.

My reasoning for watching this was very flimsy (Barton kind of looks like George S. Kaufman) but I'm certainly glad that I did. The performances from both Johns were excellent and they kept enough existential dread kindling that I paid attention to the entire movie instead of to my phone. I thought if I watched it closely enough I would "get it", but understanding everything was never the purpose here and I'm fine with that. When they brought in the two detectives to investigate a murder it started to seem like they were piling things on to intentionally obfuscate the genre and meaning of the movie, but they didn't do it in a way that seemed smarmy & egocentric like Lynch's Mulholland Drive did. I found Goodman to be firmly believable the entire way through his character arc and liked him a lot better here than I did in his movie from a couple years later, Born Yesterday.

One of the strangest movies you could see. Great cast.

In true Coen Brothers fashion, we get a film with fantastic characters and a strange, sometimes bizarre, plot — we also get John Goodman, John Turturro, and Steve Buscemi. Barton Fink follows Barton Fink (Turturro), an NYC playwright who takes a job in L.A. to write (lucrative) B-Movie scripts. When Barton arrives in L.A., it's as if he enters a new world, entirely. I'm a sucker for creepy, art-deco styled hotels — which are abundant in the city of angels — but it's more than just the lodging here that makes the city interesting. Every character Barton meets is fast-talking, charismatic, or just a little off, or a combination of two or three. In this area, I especially enjoyed Mr. Lipnick (Michael Lerner), Mr. Geiser (Tony Shalhoub), Detective Mastrionatti (Richard Portnow), Detective Deutsch (Christopher Murney), Goodman as Charlie and, although only in a few scenes, Buscemi as Chet. Early in the film, Barton passionately expels the virtues of "the common man" while continuing to cut off Charlie — a traveling insurance salesman, the epitome of the 1940s "common man" — from sharing "some stories". I think the film would've benefitted more from exploring this angle and its relevance to today's growing disdain for "coastal elites" who not only believe they know better than everyone else, but know better for everyone else. While I knew something was off with Charlie pretty early on, I didn't like the direction of the plot (not really a twist) or the ending. The ambiguous ending gives hard Hotel California "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" vibes, especially paired with Lipnick's perpetual contract (this is illegal btw, but I won't let my lawyer show) and the girl on the beach, but extended to all of Los Angeles. Barton Fink has fantastic camerawork and a very cool scene concerning the Bible. It also has one of my favorite lines in cinema: "Jesus, throw a rock in here and you'll hit [a writer]. And do me a favor, Fink, throw it hard." (As I writer, I'm allowed to say this.) I'd bet if you asked a cinephile to name favorite Coen Brothers' movies, Barton Fink wouldn't even make the top 5–7, but it's a wonderful film only a solid ending away from cracking the (90)s.