Hail, Caesar!

2016 Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Lights. Camera. Abduction.

When a Hollywood star mysteriously disappears in the middle of filming, the studio sends their "fixer" to get him back. Set in the 1950s, the story was inspired by the career of Eddie Mannix (1891–1963).

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…

Alternative Titles

Аве, Цезаре!, Hail, Caesar! - Kein Film ohne Hauptdarsteller, ¡Ave, César!, Xaire, Kaisar!, ヘイル、シーザー！, 헤일, 시저!, 凱薩萬歲!, Хай живе Цезар!, Hail, Caesar! A Tale of The Christ

mystery drama comedy

106 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★★ 24

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

When I saw this in theaters I loved it but I let other people's reactions to it convince me that it's a film that works as a collection of great individual scenes, but not as a cohesive picture. Wrong! I love this movie. I think everything single thing about it is absolutely wonderful. A gorgeous and truly joyful farce about communists and the studio system era that feels like it celebrates each just as much as it admonishes them. A studio slave is abducted by communists only to return for production on a film decrying slavery and extoling the virtues of the most famous communist of all. Feels like the Coens taking a much lighter, less fantastical stab at the…
Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 12

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 9

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 ★★★★★ 8

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 karen h. ★★★★★ 4

would that it were so simple
Review by Lucy ★★★½ 5

"would that it twuuuuuuh so simple"
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 8

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,…
Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 6

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…
Review by Lulu ★★★★

channing tatum's homoerotic tapdancing sailors musical number saved my life
Review by brat pitt ★★★

shout out to alden ehrenreich (young han solo!!!) for stealing all of his scenes and my heart 😍😍😍
Review by Josh Larsen ★★★★½ 23

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 SilentDawn ★★★★★ 7

92/100
"This is special? Who isn't who is?"
"He didn't see a Roman or a Slave, but a man."
This is the Coens's filmography skeleton key.

Recent reviews

Review by luna ★★★★

Major Wes vibes. Witty dialogue is my favorite. Eloquent vocabulary used in the most sincere way. It may be a bit pretentious but idc haha
Review by Noah Reno ★★½

It was fine. Absolutely nothing was special or memorable about this film, especially compared to other Coen Brother films. It wasn't that funny or quirky. I didn't care about any of the characters or what they were doing. There were no stakes even further convincing me to not care about anything that was going on. And most of all it was kind of boring.
Review by Val ★★★½

lo mejor es cuando abofetean a Clooney
Review by Eva ★★★★

It’s basically impossible for me not to enjoy a coen brother’s first so yes! I really enjoyed Hail, Caesar!
Review by CrappyMcDick ★★★

The word "sodomy" has been used in this and "A Serious Man" So my question is, what exactly does the Coen's find so intriguing about this particular word?
Review by pripripri ★★

i literally couldn’t even tell u what the plot of this movie was
Review by Austin Wellens ★★★★★

Young man you don’t follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs.
Review by MrGreen741 ★★★★

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

This is a decent comedy about nothing. Much like the Coen Brothers other comedies like the Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading it seems to be about nothing. However it felt a bit strange in this film. The two moments that pointed out to me that this didn’t work were the Ralph Finnes scenes and the Jonah Hill scenes. In that they were only in one and didn’t really matter to anything. But this felt different then the other times they’ve done it. It didn’t work as well. But I love what they did with George Clooney being converted to communism and Channing Tatum as an actual communist. Josh Brolin’s character was very likable and Tilda Swinton, Alden Ehrenreich, and Scarlett Johansson all have fun and entertaining performers. I’d recommend it.
Review by Braeden Udy ★★★½

I mean, its wacky and fine, but I just want to watch the entire queer musical of Channing Tatum in "No Dames: A Sailors Life at Sea."
Review by hannah 🌈 ★★★

ive seen this before but not start to finish so i was kinda bored, but its well made! where can i sign up for the commie club?
Review by Benjamin Simon ★★★½

I don’t know what it was. Maybe the stories didn’t feel balanced. Or maybe I didn’t care much for Josh Brolin’s character. It felt right there but also like there could’ve been more.
Review by Noah_Walsh ★★★½

I could see how people could easily throw this on the end of their Coen rankings but it’s perfectly delightful. Tremendous performances, and I feel like I’ll appreciate it more on rewatch. I guess the main thing missing from this as opposed to other Coen movies is a cohesiveness connecting the insane cast of characters and subplots. Yet, that’s kind of the nature of a movie studio, several moving parts all happening at once. Not every scene/gag works as well, but the standouts slap. Ralph Fiennes is a genius.