A Serious Man (2009) review

A glib film. A physics professor at the University of Minnesota (Michael Stuhlbarg) has his life disassembled piece by piece by the ever-cruel Coens, who scatter plenty of religious references from Catholicism and Judaism (the story of Job, especially) and leave you to ponder why bad things happen to good characters in the hands of mercurial filmmakers. There are some powerful moments (like the "Goy's Teeth" segment) and times when it seems like the fragments would solidify into something whole, but at the end it's just a bunch of (admittedly fascinating) ideas with a thin thread keeping them together. It's about as successful humor-wise as the clueless Intolerable Cruelty - the poke-the-dork game was much more exacting when it came to Barton Fink trying to write that goddamn screenplay.