Critical response
A Serious Man received mostly positive reviews from critics, and holds an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 227 reviews, with an average rating of 7.90/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Blending dark humor with profoundly personal themes, the Coen brothers deliver what might be their most mature—if not their best—film to date." The film also holds a score of 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 38 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film four out of four stars. His review highlighted the film's Yiddish folktale prologue, suggesting that though the Coens maintain it has no relation to the rest of the film, "maybe because an ancestor invited a dybbuk (wandering soul) to cross his threshold, Larry is cursed." In an essay in Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, Steve Zemmelman considers that the prologue may link to the Jefferson Airplane soundtrack motif, reflecting Larry's normal sense of order becoming increasingly disrupted. He writes, "what can happen when 'the wheel falls off the cart', as Velvel says happened to him on the road that night, or 'when the truth is found to be lies', that lyric from 'Somebody to Love' that serves as bookends for this film."
Claudia Puig of USA Today wrote, "A Serious Man is a wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film. Underlying the grim humor are serious questions about faith, family, mortality and misfortune." Time magazine critic Richard Corliss called it "disquieting" and "haunting".
Some critics, including Roger Ebert, commented on the link between the film and the Biblical Book of Job. K. L. Evans wrote, "we identify it as a Job story because its central character is tormented by his failure to account for the miseries that befall him". In his essay "Job of Suburbia?", David Tollerton wrote, "the more substantial connection between A Serious Man and the Book of Job—the connection that reaches deeper—is their similarly absurd presentations of the human struggle with anguish and the divine." Slate magazine critic Juliet Lapidos considered that the folktale prologue may be an endorsement of the "gumption" of "taking matters into her own hands".
The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern disliked what he saw as the film's misanthropy, saying that "their caricatures range from dislikable through despicable, with not a smidgeon of humanity to redeem them." David Denby of The New Yorker enjoyed the film's look and feel, but found fault with the script and characterization: "A Serious Man, like Burn After Reading, is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it's hell to sit through ... As a piece of movie-making craft, A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it's intolerable." Zemmelman wrote that this kind of viewer response results from the film's lack of narrative resolution: "The film is perplexing and the dialogue reminds the viewer repeatedly that we are in an encounter with the ever-conflictual and the infinitely mysterious."
Todd McCarthy said, "A Serious Man is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar." Ebert quoted McCarthy in his review: "'This is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar,' writes Todd McCarthy in Variety. I cannot improve on that."
Awarding the film five stars in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, "this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing. The Coens have finished the noughties as America's preeminent filmmakers".
A Serious Man was later voted the 82nd-greatest film since 2000 in a BBC international critics' poll. In 2021, members of Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 42nd in WGA's 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far). In 2025, the film ranked 36th on The New York Times's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century".
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