Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 13

  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…

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★★ 27

  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…

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  Review by karen h. ★★★★★ 5

  would that it were so simple

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  Review by Lucy ★★★½ 5

  "would that it twuuuuuuh so simple"

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  Review by Evan ★★★½ 10

  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.

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  Review by f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶r̶ movie enjoyer ★★★★

  channing tatum's homoerotic tapdancing sailors musical number saved my life

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  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…

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  Review by karsten ★★½ 3

  Wasn't bad, wasn't great. One of the most average films I've ever seen. Pretty disappointing considering what I was expecting but oh well.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 16

  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,…

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  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…

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  Review by ellie ✨ ★★★★½ 2

  don't talk to me unless ur gay communist channing tatum

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  I think this is possibly the platonic ideal of how to use Channing Tatum in your movie