Here’s my glowing review of the Coen Brothers’ latest, A Serious Man, from the latest issue of  jmag.

A SERIOUS MAN

Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind

Remember seeing the last Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, and wondering: what the hell was the point? Or their film before that, No Country For Old Men, with its bamboozling, creepy non-ending? Now the Coens have taken that same sense of pointlessness and transformed it into their best screenplay since The Big Lebowski.

A Serious Man is impossible to do justice to in a plot summary. (Okay, fine. “Larry Gopnik, head of a Jewish family in 1960s suburbia, who loses his faith as his life inexplicably falls apart.” You happy now?) Larry, played by mostly-unknown Michael Stuhbarg, is utterly sympathetic as a man trying to do what’s right while slowly succumbing to hysteria.

It’s funny, awful, and heartfelt. Like an absurd episode of the Wonder Years, maybe, if Kevin’s grown-up narration was actually the Voice of God and had gone mysteriously silent. It’s been true for two decades now: when a Coen Brothers’ film is firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing else like it.

Other reviews by me this month:  Dead Set and Crank 2: High Voltage on DVD, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in cinemas.

Issue #34 is on sale now.