Like all the Coens' movies, "Man" is supremely self-aware and darkly, hellishly funny. It's also brilliantly written and acted to a fare-thee-well by an outrageously good cast.

Most of the way this ranks with the Coens' most immaculately crafted work. Cain would have loved its dreamlike chills, and so will audiences nostalgic for the movies of half a century ago.

The Coens' plotting, with its suspense and reversals, is a source of amazement and delight.

For all its long shadows and ominous atmosphere, this is a very funny movie -- as funny as the Coens' masterful "Fargo."

If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.

It's an entirely conceived work of art, dark and hopeless and maybe even callous, but glittering and wonderful in its determination and in its craft.

You could say a lot about the very satisfying The Man Who Wasn't There, but what's for sure is that no one but the deadpan, dead-on Coen brothers could have turned it out.

When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.

The Coens have resurrected a hardscrabble California of wooden porches and gravel driveways, of rolling, oak-wreathed hills and one-lane roads, and of a restless people whose meager dreams are wrecked the moment money, sex or a bottle get in the way. Never has the past seemed so familiar.

The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.

Steadily engrossing and devilishly funny, and, o brother, does it look sharp.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.

It's the latest and one of the best entries in a genre whose highest philosophical expression is the whiplash realization that the universe doesn't play fair.