Metacritic Movie Ratings
A Serious Man Reviews

A sample of reviews from critics across the country.

• 100

  out of 100

  Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert

  Have I mentioned A Serious Man is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny too.

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• 100

  out of 100

  Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan

  Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

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• 91

  out of 100

  Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman

  Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."

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• 90

  out of 100

  The New York TimesA.O. Scott

  The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers' movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)

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• 88

  out of 100

  USA TodayClaudia Puig

  A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film.

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• 80

  out of 100

  The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt

  The always surprising Coen brothers have finally made a very serious movie with A Serious Man. It's about God, man's place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it's one of their funnier movies.

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• 70

  out of 100

  VarietyTodd McCarthy

  One doesn't know how (auto)biographical any or all of this is, but there's a tartness to the telling of what amounts to a well-shaped series of anecdotes that bespeaks distant pain or, at least, wincing memory twisted into mordant comedy by time and sensibility.

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