Scintillating, uproarious, substantial, and playfully personal.

| Mar 23, 2020

In other words, it's perfect, and like the best of the duo's achievements it's an ending I'm going to be pondering for quite a long time to come.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 15, 2016

Hail, Caesar! imagines the inner dealings of Hollywood during the early 20th century ... But the film's point for these shenanigans is possibly nonexistent.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2016

The greatest thing about Hail, Caesar! is that its loose structure allows the Coens to just mess around with the things they like.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 13, 2016

It is, all in all, mid-level Coens. But as so many others have noted, mid-level Coens still tops most other filmmakers at their peak.

| Apr 27, 2016

Mostly it's about the meaning of life by way of religion, with which the Coens have always fiddled, sometimes dancing around the edges and sometimes diving straight into the middle.

| Mar 30, 2016

For all its knockabout silliness, the film is a love letter to the movies - or rather, to a dream of the movies.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2016

You could see it as a sampling menu for Chez Coen. Like most sampling menus, however, Hail, Caesar! leaves you craving a proper main course.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2016

As for the Coens themselves, eccentric and critical Hollywood tomb raiders they might be but, like Sturges, they believe sincerely in the value of delight for its own sake.

| Mar 3, 2016

The latest film from the Coen brothers is a comedy set during the 'golden age' of Hollywood and in some respects it is utterly delicious.

| Mar 3, 2016

Hail, Caesar! represents a breakthrough for the brothers as storytellers

| Mar 3, 2016

Think of Altman's The Player; mix it with random pages of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon; shake and serve.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2016

It's not encumbered with significance, but richly affectionate and very entertaining. Hail, Caesar! is something to be greeted as a gorgeous exercise in style.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2016

Hail, Caesar! is that rare beast: a feel-good Coen brothers film. It feels very good indeed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 23, 2016

Every new scene is a surprising delight in what, at the time, appearing as a sunny, screwball satire pinpointing the moment where the Hollywood production line was starting to clank and creak.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 22, 2016

Although it's beautifully crafted, filled with amusing detail and in-jokes and cast with the Coens' usual deft precision, it all falls a little flat.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 19, 2016

Their latest, Hail, Caesar!, is their giddiest comedy to date, but it's also hit-and-miss within itself.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2016

Hail, Caesar! ... a slice of Hollywood fluff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.1/2 | Feb 16, 2016

As Coen movies go, this is one of the most upbeat and optimistic, one of the few to suggest that good people can have happy endings. Classic Hollywood wouldn't have it any other way.

| Feb 12, 2016

The Coen brothers' new comedy isn't quite an homage to 1950s Hollywood, but it's not a spoof of it either -- it strikes that tone of crisp drollness that's their specialty and that some people misread as aloofness or contempt. But it's not.

| Feb 12, 2016