The Man Who Wasn’t There

The Coen brothers peer into the existential abyss of the atomic age in this coolly riveting, drolly profound noir thriller. In a performance of masterfully calibrated understatement, Billy Bob Thornton stars as a disaffected barber in 1940s California whose suspicion that his wife (Frances McDormand) is cheating on him leads him down a crooked path of blackmail and murder. Fusing the expressionistic black and white and hard-boiled poetry of classic noir with their own idiosyncratic feeling for sinister, surreal Americana, Joel and Ethan Coen craft an arresting vision of the cruelty of fate and the mystery of our place in the cosmos.