Popular reviews

• 

  Review by darth_erogenous ★★★★★ 7

  My neighbor Turturro

• 

  Review by demi adejuyigbe 5

  Dark, dark, dark, and almost purposefully alienating. A great depiction of writer's block, distraction, the bloodsucking nature of "muse", the emptiness of art produced under capitalism, and the pretentiousness of working class tourism. Or, so I think! Who knows what da hell this movie's about!!

  Tony Shalhoub and Michael Lerner are so fucking good. Writing do be like that sometimes!

• 

  Review by k(arst)en ★★★½ 1

  light n easy watch before bed

• 

  Review by hunkamunka ★★★★★ 10

  Barton Fink is packed full of symbolism, allegory, and open-ended questions. About one man's struggles as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the film is at once realism and surrealism; comedy and tragedy. Willing you to discern meaning behind images and lines, Joel and Ethan Coen tease the viewer with a multitude of possible interpretations of their story and its characters. Littered with references to other films, novels, and poems, the viewing experience is overwhelming but rewarding.

  With exhilarating performances from John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, and Judy Davis, this is very much a character driven piece. Exploring the "life of the mind" from different angles, we are introduced to a variety of characters, each with their own issues and secrets.…

• 

  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 4

  Life is hell.

• 

  Review by Jizzmonkey ★★★★★ 2

  I feel Barton's pain. Being a writer is frustrating, that's for sure. The pay is terrible, and sometimes the words just don't

• 

  Review by Travis Lytle ★★★★ 15

  If the Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis" is a portrait of the artist as eternal wanderer, then their "Barton Fink" is a portrait of the artist as eternally distracted. It is, that is, until it becomes an indictment of soulless, brainless Hollywood product that then turns turns into a Faustian Los Angeles-is-hell allegory before returning to its meditation on the artist. To be sure, "Barton Fink" has a lot on its narrative plate. Although that mix of ideas, metaphors, symbols, and plot threads can be a little much, the film is an engrossing and inspired piece of work.

  Barton Fink is a New York playwright who heeds the siren song of movie-writing and moves to Hollywood. "Barton Fink" is his…

• 

  Review by Keith ★★★★★ 2

  "You're just a tourist with a typewriter. I live here."

  Easy Barton Fink primer:

  A self-absorbed NYC playwright lauds the virtue of the common man all while remaining deaf to others; his lack of empathy lands him in a Hollywood hell.

  
  With hints of an allegory about US isolationist policies (and some nasty business with fluids).

• 

  Review by Ethan Geist ★★★★½

  Coen Brothers                David Fincher
                   
                                     🤝

  
                WHAT’S IN THE BOX

• 

  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★

  Barton Fink is a singular work in the Coen brothers canon. It's their most symbolically oriented movie, and the closest they've ever come to offering an artistic manifesto. The story of Barton Fink, earnest young 'playwright of the common man' who goes to Hollywood to write for the pictures and finds himself in a hell of his own making, doubles as a metaphor for the creative process. The Hollywood studio system, in the person of vulgarian studio head Jack Lipnick and broken, dipsomaniacal screenwriter Bill Mayhew, is shown to be the artistically bankrupt shit-factory we all know it to be, but the real revelation is that Fink, for all of his pretensions to Beauty through Truth, is as creatively crippled…

• 

  Review by jourdain searles ★★★★★

  perfect horror movie

• 

  Review by Hot Take Nick ★★★★½ 6

  Hot damn I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would. 

  My favorite part about this has to be the script. So brilliantly witty. I got such a big kick out of the whole “meta” self-obsessed writer thing. The scene where Fink is telling Mudnt about how most writers ignore the common people as Mudnt is desperately trying to interject with stories about the common people. I mean just gold. 
  And the dramatic turn this movie took seventy minutes in. I mean damn I didn’t see that coming and it felt like a dramatically large turn but it worked so well. 

  It was really neat to see where the Coen brothers’ usual suspects started out too. Turturro. Goodman.…