A Serious Man

5.00
    A Serious Man
    2009

    Synopsis

    It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances Sy Ableman.

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    Cast

    • Michael StuhlbargLarry Gopnik
    • Richard KindUncle Arthur
    • Fred MelamedSy Ableman
    • Sari LennickJudith Gopnik
    • Aaron WolffDanny Gopnik
    • Jessica McManusSarah Gopnik
    • Peter BreitmayerMr. Brandt
    • Brent BraunschweigMitch Brandt
    • David KangClive Park
    • Benjamin PortnoeDanny's Reefer Buddy

    Recommendations

    • 100

      Variety

      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.
    • 100

      Time Out

      See this film immediately.
    • 100

      Salon

      I found this beautifully crafted movie to be frequently hilarious, consistently surprising and rigged with spring-loaded narrative bombs, from its opening scene to its devastating final shot.
    • 91

      Entertainment Weekly

      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."
    • 91

      The A.V. Club

      WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.
    • 90

      New York Magazine (Vulture)

      A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.
    • 88

      ReelViews

      The presence of so many low-key performers gives A Serious Man a very different, distinctly non-Hollywood vibe. The absence of familiar faces allows the Coens to fully immerse their audience in the time (1967) and place (the U.S. Midwest) of the story.
    • 80

      The Hollywood Reporter

      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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