Academy Awards nominee: A Serious Man

After No Country for Old Men won four Oscars in 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen return with their most personal work yet, setting the film in a Jewish-American suburb in 1960s Minnesota, similar to the one where the brothers grew up and marked their bar mitzvahs.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a put-upon, mild-mannered physics professor, whose many problems include a crumbling marriage, a live-in deadbeat brother, a pothead son and self-involved daughter. "Larry Gopnik just might be the most out-and-out normal person ever to be put at the centre of a Coen brothers film," said Ethan Coen.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:Andrew Pulver, the Guardian: "What pushes [A Serious Man] into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here... The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It's paid wonderful dividends." (Verdict: five stars out of five).

Todd McCarthy, 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."

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "His mountain of woes notwithstanding, Larry Gopnik just might be the most out-and-out normal person ever to be put at the centre of a Coen brothers film, and his everyman status helps explain one of the film's apparent paradoxes: its ability to be both intensely Jewish and speak to everyone."

Ben Walters, Time Out: "The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes: ­ florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters, ­ but the film's potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation." (Verdict: five stars out of five).

Kevin Maher, the Times: "That the film refuses to supply any answers is not a sign of weakness, but rather an acknowledgement that the Coens, despite being two of the finest film-makers working in cinema today, are not God." (Verdict: four stars out of five). ·