What is Hail, Caesar!? What isn’t Hail, Caesar!? It’s a comedy, a noir, a historical epic, a musical (of two different varieties), and a melodrama. It’s a movie about the glory days of the industry that churns them out, and how the system so often resembled 1,000 spinning plates wobbling in perfect harmony for a split second. It’s a film about faith, and the pivotal role that it plays in one man’s search for meaning amidst the chaos of existence. It’s a tale of the Christ, told by two Jews who wouldn’t trust Jesus to save a cat out of a tree, let alone someone’s mortal soul. That is to say: It’s a Coen brothers movie, and one of their…

92/100

"Would that it were so simple.”

Hail, Caesar! begins with the image of a crucifix as a solemn hymn silently sings within a quiet church, establishing an earnest degree of gravity in a surrounding world of profound, bewildering zaniness. It is in this opening image, soon dissolving into a close-up of Christ’s universal display of sacrifice, where we meet the Coens; not as filmmakers, but as autobiographers. That’s not to say that Hail, Caesar! is strictly about any specific experience, but it feels mined from within, a slapstick-y scream of annoyance and frustration that continuously trails back, wounded but energized, to the swelling love of cinema.

Much can be stated about the film’s pure aesthetic pleasures, evoking the classicism…

49/100

Not the Coens' worst (though it's close), but easily their laziest. Structurally, it's a disaster, continually and arbitrarily switching back and forth between puckish character study (of a surprisingly bland character) and goofy ensemble piece—it's as if (a blander) Llewyn Davis had wandered into Burn After Reading, which would do neither Llewyn nor BAR's clockwork plotting any favors. More than that, though, Hail, Caesar! plays like 21st-century Woody Allen, which is to say that it feels like they wrote exactly one draft and then immediately shot it. (Casting tons of recognizable faces in forgettable bit parts—did they really need Alex Karpovsky to walk around a room snapping photos?—heightens the resemblance.) So many potentially terrific ideas never amount to anything,…

DIVINE PRESENCE TO BE SHOT

the coen's oeuvre is a varied one chalk full of different genres, ideas, characters etc, sometimes light & wacky, other times heavy & serious but there is a constant -- the coen's love to tell stories about individuals pointlessly (but endearingly) fighting the stupid, chaotic, contradictory systems that, for whatever reason, control human life. whether it be the existential grasping of A Serious Man or Barton Fink, or the straight-up moronic confusion of Burn After Reading ("all bureaucracy, no mission"), the coen's never fail to argue for the little guy's individualism in systems that see no value in them. they're just as humanistic as they are nihilistic. and in this regard Hail, Caesar is the coen brothers…

I was a bit worried, I have to admit. The weird February release and the late screening for critics nationwide had me thinking that The Coen Bros, who are probably the most consistently good filmmakers today, may have released a rare clunker. Hail, Coens! because their latest, “Hail, Caesar! is right up there with the best of the brothers’ zanier dumb screwball comedies, that are, of course, smarter than I’ll ever be able to dissect. But that’s what makes Coen Brothers so damn rewatchable, that you can continue to peel the layers with every view as you realize that each line of their dialogue has been combed through over and over, or you can just simply enjoy it for dumb…

After what must be my sixth or seventh rewatch of Hail, Caesar! I got to thinking about favourite films, specifically: what is the criteria for one? Does it require an attachment to a particular time or place in your life? Does it require longevity to ensure that it's not just a flavour of the month? Does the film itself need to be objectively good, or of a particular standard, in addition to your personal relationship with it? Do you need to have seen it more than once? I don't really have any answers to these questions and it's more likely that the criteria is different for each person, maybe even each favourite film, but I'm now convinced that this is…