Coens return to their roots for A Serious Man

After No Country for Old Men won four Oscars in 2007 and last year's Burn after Reading became their first movie to top the US weekend box office, Joel and Ethan Coen are back with what is possibly their most personal film yet.

A Serious Man is the brothers' 14th film and - at first glance at least - appears to be a change of tack in contrast to earlier quirky thrillers such as Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996). Although not exactly autobiographical, A Serious Man sees the Coens look to their roots, setting the film in a Jewish-American suburb in 1960s Minnesota, similar to the one where the brothers grew up and marked their bar mitzvahs.

Yet the film still deals with many of the Coens' recurring themes, in which human existence and the search for meaning in a random, godless universe are ultimately futile. And the same brand of fatalistic, Jewish humour - present in Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski - also runs through A Serious Man.

After a five-minute Yiddish-language prologue (a Jewish 'folk tale', contrived by the Coens, about a righteous man who may, in fact, be a ghost), the action moves to 1967 and the American Midwest where Larry Gopnik, a put-upon, mild-mannered physics professor, lives in a hermetically sealed Jewish community.

Despite his conscientious attempts to keep his faith and be a 'serious man', nothing seems to go right for Larry (played by Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg who heads up a largely unknown cast). His many problems include a crumbling marriage, his live-in