"If Philip Roth and Franz Kafka sat down to write an adaptation of the Book of Job," said Alonso Duralde in MSNBC.com, "the result might be something like A Serious Man." Joel and Ethan Coen's "thought-provoking" and fascinating new film, set in 1967 and centering on a Midwestern professor who faces an existential dilemma when his wife decides to leave him, "examines faith and religion, crime and punishment, and the very notion that a supreme being might actually be paying close enough attention to lay down some Old Testament smiting when we step out of line" (watch the trailer for A Serious Man).
A Serious Man begins "mysteriously, with what feels like a Yiddish folk tale," said David Denby in The New Yorker, and "as a piece of moviemaking craft," this is a "fascinating" film. But "it's hell to sit through": The Coen brothers' "humor is distant, dry, and shriveling, and they make the people in A Serious Man so drably unappealing that you begin to wonder what kind of disgust the brothers are working off."
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