#1301: COEN, Joel: The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

COEN, Joel (United States)
The Man Who Wasn't There [2001]
Spine #1301
Blu-ray


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.

116 minutes
5.0 Surround
Black and White
1:85:1
Criterion Release 2026

Director/Writer

Joel Coen was 47 when he directed The Man Who Wasn't There.

Other Coen films in the Collection:

#834: Blood Simple (1984)

The Film

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Commentary

Video tribute

Documentary 1

Documentary 2

Documentary 3

Controversial altered ending

Theatrical trailer


Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

99

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