Who´s in it?
Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick

What´s the plot?
The latest film from Joel & Ethan Coen, ‘A Serious Man’ explores faith, responsibility, mortality and dentistry…!

Larry Gopnik, a physics professor, discovers his wife is leaving him for one of his acquaintances. Meanwhile his unemployable brother is sleeping on the couch, his son is in constant trouble and his daughter is stealing money to fund a nose job. If that wasn’t enough, a student is also trying to sue and his neighbour torments him by sunbathing in the nude. Visiting three different rabbis for advice, Larry struggles to get his life back on track and become ‘a mensch’ – a serious man.

If you liked ‘Burn After Reading’ and ‘Adaptation’, you’ll love ‘A Serious Man’.

BBFC Consumer Advice
Contains strong language and soft drug use .
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I love the Coens, have written dissertations on their films and I really really wanted to like this one but found it so parochial, ponderous and obscure that I really struggled to enjoy it at all and found it really quite dull.

Of course it is beautifully shot and played and shows a lot of amusing promise early on but once it has settled in to its convoluted pace it never quite manages to dig itself out and the constant Jewish references become increasingly tedious and frustrating. I like twisted and bizarre humour (especially when written by the Coens) and I also like a challenge with a movie but this film was simply way too personal and, unforgivably, unfunny.

Stay in, watch something else at the cinema or go out for dinner but don't go and see this. You may leave the screening in admiration of the technical achievement but you'll also be bored and bemused and will have a nagging feeling that you have just lost two hours of your life which you will never get back.

You have been warned!

Hilarious and melancholy. The Book of Job was never the happiest of books in the Bible. Any you don\'t have to be religious or Jewish to understand this film. The opening is bizarre.

Sometimes I wonder if the Cohen brothers are just messing about, exploiting their status to see how crazy films they can produce before someone stops them. This goes neatly into that category. It can be seen as an exposé of how people prefer to let religion get in the way for personal responsibility, but it can also be seen (as I did) as a major criticism of religion in itself (in a general term), which is a good thing. The main character is a real contender for wimp of the decennium, with his passive role in relation to his completely disgusting and soon to be divorced wife, very nicely played by Sari Lennick, and Fred Melamed is hilarious in his small, but important part. The end is very good.