‎Hail, Caesar! (2016) directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd

Hail, Caesar!

2016 Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Lights. Camera. Abduction.

Tells the comedic tale of Eddie Mannix, a fixer who worked for the Hollywood studios in the 1950s. The story finds him at work when a star mysteriously disappears in the middle of filming.

Josh Brolin George Clooney Alden Ehrenreich Ralph Fiennes Scarlett Johansson Tilda Swinton Channing Tatum Frances McDormand Jonah Hill Veronica Osorio Heather Goldenhersh Alison Pill Max Baker Fisher Stevens Patrick Fischler Tom Musgrave David Krumholtz Greg Baldwin Patrick Carroll Fred Melamed John Bluthal Alex Karpovsky Armazd Stepanian Allan Havey Robert Pike Daniel Robert Picardo Ian Blackman Geoffrey Cantor Christopher Lambert Show All…

106 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 11

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…
Review by Evan ★★★½ 13

There was a point in time when I didn't like Channing Tatum; what a fucking idiot I was.

The film is very entertaining, but its kind of all over the place. There's A LOT of great scenes, but the movie itself didn't completely come together for me. Definitely enjoyed it overall though.

Like a good chunk of the Coen Brothers' filmography; this is definitely one I'm going to have to watch more than once to fully appreciate it. Heck, I didn't care much for The Big Lebowski after my first watch and now I've seen it 10+ times. That film is my Bible.
Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 9

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…
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 6

49/100

[original one-sheet]

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…
Review by Josh Larsen ★★★★½ 24

Hail, Caesar! is many things: a rip-roaring ode to old-fashioned entertainment (dancing, swimming, lassoing and the like); a silly farce peppered with wordplay, innuendo and wit; and a chronicle of spiritual crisis, in which one man tries to find his ultimate purpose. But mostly it's a creative clarion call to celebrate the way cinema can be all of these things, sometimes even at once. This is the Coens’ Sullivan’s Travels, a meta comedy that wants to deflate the pretensions of Hollywood even as it’s giving the movies themselves a giant hug. As such, it might just be their magnum opus.

Full review here.
Review by josh lewis 🌹 ★★★★½ 7

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…

Recent reviews

Review by Josephine Ulnits ★★★½

(4th one in my "Let's get it done - at least one a week"-list of shame challenge)
I really wish this had been 30 minutes longer. The pacing was so uneven and sometimes very rushed, so with a longer runtime they could have told the story better instead of skipping over some parts that could have been really interesting.
But it has some GREAT scenes and it was a great homage to the less amazing part of Hollywood's good ol' days. All the actors were really great, I especially loved Alden Ehrenreich's Hobie, he was beyond adorable.
Review by emmacook62 ½

i honestly though this would be better.... like the cast was awesome but i got really bored really fast
Review by Steven Cohen ★★★★½

Many people quickly wrote off Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! last year (though I did not), but I found more to dig into on the second watch. There's a lot to unpack from the passion play allegory paired with the mythologizing of Hollywood studio system. And Roger Deakins makes it all look good.
Review by Zach Nabors ★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Joel and Ethan Coen again perpetuate my belief that they are the Howard Hawks of this generation. With Hail, Caesar! the Coens are back with their usual suspects in one of their most unapologetically comedic outputs in quite some time, though the levels of laughs are not what they should have been, though it should be noted and appreciated that their sophisticated humor keeps growing in complexity and scope further putting them into the ranks with the likes of some of their filmic-comedic idols: the aforementioned Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturgess and Billy Wilder. Hail, Caesar! is an incredibly polished, lushly visual gambol in a post-Barton Fink landscape where the writer has burned the house down (metaphorically and literally as…
Review by Danastri Nabilah ★★★½

a dark humour poetry for Hollywood history
Review by K_Ellis ★★★½ 2

FΩck it

90/100
Review by mvsolid ★★★½

sadly undercooked and unconvincingly cynical, like a highbrow south park

coens are coens, so the perfomances are great and some scenes are pleasing, but it is not a very good time as a whole
Review by HockeyKong ★★★★½

Just another great, funny, Cohen Brothers period piece, this time set against a 1940s Hollywood backdrop.

Alden Ehrenreich as a hopelessly tongue-tied western star thrust into a posh romance is by far the funniest part of the film, though every performer is fantastic (particular shout-outs to Brolin, Clooney, & Swinton. And David Krumholtz, whose role is very small but I thought was very funny)

Knocking off half a star because I only give a full 5 to comedies that make me fall out of my seat laughing.
Review by Mark Cunliffe ★★★★ 5

If you love the golden age of Hollywood, chances are you'll love Hail, Caesar! - the Coen brothers' glorious homage to post-war tinseltown. The recreations of studio movies (ranging from On The Town style musical comedy to the Quo Vadis style Biblical epic) are affectionate and peerless, the real key strength to the movie, as are the cast of characters who each feel reminiscent of one or two notable Hollywood legends. If, like me, you spent your childhood watching matinees of yesteryear on TV, you're in for a real nostalgic treat.

But the film is equally a homage to the real behind the scenes life of Hollywood at this time too. Eddie Mannix, the studio Mr Fix-It played by Josh…