...a briskly-paced, incredibly stylish piece of work that fares best in its compelling and periodically enthralling first half...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 29, 2024

The film doesn't have anything you'd recognize as content, but it is as precisely made as a wonderful machine, funny in a mode of zany giddiness, and boasts both a German expressionist sensibility and an angel who smokes a cigar.

| Feb 29, 2024

There is more intelligence and inventiveness in any random five minutes of a film by Joel and Ethan Coen than you can find in an entire year's worth of movies from some studios I can think of.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 29, 2024

...The Hudsucker Proxy feels positively Capra-esque (well, a hair twisted on that ethos) as its the most loving homage the brothers made to the actual Golden Age films that inspired them...

| Feb 22, 2024

The Hudsucker Proxy will have people saying "they don't make 'em like that anymore." Of course, with the Coens' simultaneously sage and silly vision, they never made 'em like that to begin with. The Hudsucker Proxy is a singularly spectacular film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2024

The Coens turn a classic Horatio Alger tale into a hilariously off-kilter pastiche of pastiches. The more you love movies, the more gags you'll catch.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 18, 2024

The Coens should be applauded, not spanked, for their virtuoso playfulness.

| Original Score: A | Aug 31, 2022

What's wrong with The Hudsucker Proxy, though, is that, for all its craftsmanship it is an utterly soulless enterprise. The Coens wisely show no inclination to parody their sources here, but neither do they seem to have anything else in mind for them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 22, 2021

...has an unexpected sense of benevolence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 23, 2021

I have, minimally, enjoyed every film from the Coen Brothers, yet in my eyes The Hudsucker Proxy is the finest of all of them.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 11, 2020

Dark Coen Brothers screwball comedy has suicide, smoking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2020

Once the film gets up to speed, it remains going fast enough to barrel through the awkward blend of tones.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 12, 2020

It is possible to create something emotionally true out of second-hand ingredients, in fact that's what Hollywood does, but it isn't the Coen Brothers' strong point.

| Nov 16, 2017

Few of the Coen Brothers' films spike the vein of pure pleasure as easily. It's an irresistibly loquacious, unpredictably riotous comedy that dares you to keep up with its daffiness and doesn't give a damn whether you get left behind.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 1, 2014

| Original Score: C | Sep 7, 2011

A pastiche of a movie that lacks distinct identity and authenticity, made up of borrowed parts from scrwball comedies Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges.

| Original Score: C | Aug 4, 2010

A visually arresting but emotionally uninvolving dark comedy.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2007

A jeering, dreamlike comedy with nothing much on its mind except how neat the Coen brothers are and how stupid or contemptible everybody else is, including everyone in the audience.

| Nov 6, 2007

An impressive technical achievement--the period New York sets are to die for -- and its version of the invention of the hula-hoop is a comic highlight.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 6, 2007

Nearly everything in the Coen brothers' latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be.

| Nov 6, 2007