Coens return to their roots for A Serious Man

After No Country for Old Men won four Oscars in 2007 and last year's Burn after Reading became their first movie to top the US weekend box office, Joel and Ethan Coen are back with what is possibly their most personal film yet.

A Serious Man is the brothers' 14th film and - at first glance at least - appears to be a change of tack in contrast to earlier quirky thrillers such as Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996). Although not exactly autobiographical, A Serious Man sees the Coens look to their roots, 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.

Yet the film still deals with many of the Coens' recurring themes, in which human existence and the search for meaning in a random, godless universe are ultimately futile. And the same brand of fatalistic, Jewish humour - present in Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski - also runs through A Serious Man.

After a five-minute Yiddish-language prologue (a Jewish 'folk tale', contrived by the Coens, about a righteous man who may, in fact, be a ghost), the action moves to 1967 and the American Midwest where Larry Gopnik, a put-upon, mild-mannered physics professor, lives in a hermetically sealed Jewish community.

Despite his conscientious attempts to keep his faith and be a 'serious man', nothing seems to go right for Larry (played by Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg who heads up a largely unknown cast). His many problems include a crumbling marriage, his live-in deadbeat brother, his pothead son and self-involved daughter, a redneck neighbour and the malicious professional rumours that threaten his university tenure.

Larry - who deals with mathematical certainties in his work - struggles to understand why a lot of bad stuff appears to happen to him for no apparent reason.

The New York Times reviewer likened Larry to the Old Testament character Job. Ethan Coen has described Larry as a "character who's looking for some kind of meaning who's repeatedly stymied in that quest".

The film's lurking sense of anxiety is heightened by the way it is shot, edited and scored like a horror movie. And yet A Serious Man is still a comedy in the classic Coen brothers' tradition ­ in their use of droll humour, offbeat details and colourful characters.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING: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) ·