The latest film from the prodigious Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, their ‘Jewish film’ as it seems to have become known, is an absolute triumph of rich humour and pathos and is, for me, their finest and most accomplished to date. With its release the Midwest brothers have firmly established themselves as two of the sharpest, and darkest, observers of American life, as well as the most prolific, and consistently brilliant, creative minds in the English –speaking film industry. Since their film debut in 1984 they have produced a stunning anthology that is of such a consistently high quality that even their relative misses (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading) must be considered minor triumphs that will, almost inevitably, be looked upon more favourably as that anthology grows. Furthermore, their ability to transcend stereotypes, to blur genres, and to do so with such exceptional dexterity, makes each film a new and rare treat. It is a capacity to surprise they share with an exceedingly rare number of filmmakers from history, if any at all who are working in Hollywood today.

The titular serious man of their latest outing is insecure theoretical physics professor, Larry Gopnik, played by Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg, a man whose life slips free of its moorings in a series of tragic yet wickedly funny life crises in the lead up to his son’s bar mitzvah. First, his heavy-handed wife announces that she wants a gett, a formal Jewish divorce, so that she can remarry to their friend, the fabulously unctuous and gelatinous Sy Abelman (the remarkable Fred Melamed). A wonderfully deadpan, gnomic South Korean student is trying to blackmail and bribe him for a passing grade in college. His son, Danny, is experimenting with pot and neglecting his Hebrew studies. His wildly intelligent yet socially ill-equipped elder brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is sleeping on his couch, variously draining his sebaceous cyst, getting arrested or suffering mental meltdown. His academic future rests on a knife edge as he awaits the decision on his tenure. His neighbor harbours malign feelings towards him and all things non-American. And he is beset by ever deepening financial concerns. Life, it is fair to say, is conspiring against Larry Gopnik.

In his search for answers, from a series of three consecutively senior Rabbis, the Coens take the audience on a journey that is both deeply moving and laugh-out-loud funny. The breakdown that we anticipate does, in fact, never materialise and instead Gopnik, numbed by the sheer weight of events that have beset him, experiences something of an epiphany, a vision of his life that allows him to recalibrate own condition and the quintessence of who he is and should be. But, as with all things Coen, nothing is ever quite as straightforward as it first appears.

As with so many of their films, in A Serious Man the brothers have conceived both characters and conditions that portray and evoke an extraordinary range of emotions. Yet where most, heavier filmmakers pitch their creations at either ends of the range, the Coens have a far more intuitive lightness of touch, knowing precisely where and when to draw their lines, to pull back and change tack. Their characters are brilliantly conceived, never clumsy and acutely realised and the communities in which they exist understood and satirized with unerring accuracy.

What we are rewarded with is a wonderfully hypnotic film about a man and a society in search of enlightenment, that from the very opening frames flits tantilisingly across a divergent scope of feelings. It is gloriously funny yet tragically bleak, breathtakingly simple yet profoundly complicated, bitingly satirical yet deeply reverential, utterly rewarding yet acutely disturbing. Above all, though, it is another fiercely intelligent film from the two sharpest minds in Hollywood and serves to cement their burgeoning reputation as preeminent, master storytellers.