This month’s Empire magazine has a feature called the “10 Movies We Want to See Right Now”. In it the Coens’ True Grit is 3rd. The small write up says nothing new but does have the UK release date listed as January 14th.

The Coen’s latest, A Serious Man opens today in the UK, Sweden and Iceland!

Even though it opened in the US SEVEN weeks ago some other countries have it even worse! Check out this list of release dates;

JANUARY 2010!!! Wow!

Go see it if you can. Read the YKFK review here.

A Serious Man had its UK premiere last night at the London Film Festival. Check out the Guardian’s 5 star review which claims that this movie could be their masterpiece…

“The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.

Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s mid-west America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing.

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coen-ised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk(wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don’t muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons.

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.

His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.

To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused.

It’s this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.)

The Coens, though, don’t quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there’s something very personal going on here.

It’s not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens’ own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik’s son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It’s  paid wonderful dividends.” - Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 28th October 2009. *****

Who knew there was such a thing but A Serious Man is opening the UK Jewish Film Festival ‘09. It is showing on 7th November at 8:30pm as part of the opening night gala at the Odeon Swiss Cottage, which sounds like a lovely place to watch a movie. However, the movie’s showing at the London Film Festival still marks it’s UK bow.

The Coen brothers’ latest movie, A Serious Man, will have it’s US premiere as the opening movie of the the inaugural edition of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival on Sept. 24 at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City.

So, to sum up;

World Premiere – Saturday 12th September (9pm) at the Toronto International Film Festival

US Premiere – Thursday September 24th at the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival

UK Premiere – Tuesday October 25th at the Times BFI 53rd London International Film Festival

Empire online are carrying a wee story about the release of the A Serious Man trailer yesterday (as is just about every other site on the internet) and within it they claim that the release date here in the UK is November 20th. A full SEVEN WEEKS behind you lucky Americans!

Burn After Reading sits atop the UK box office after its opening weekend with a take of £2.04m which is double that of thriller, Eagle Eye, which is in second with £1.09m. You can see the top 10 here. As Coen fans you might like to know that Igor, an animated kid’s movie with Steve Buscemi on voice duties is at number 3. 

I went to see Tropic Thunder last week (I though it was great but got a bit soggy in the middle, incidentally it was co-written by one Etan Coen- not to be confused with Ethan Coen) and I was getting seated just as a Burn After Reading trailer began playing and I noticed immediately that it was different than the one I was familiar with. One scene in particular stood out which shows clearly (and graphically) what Harry (George Clooney) has been making in his basement, so if you don’t want to see this hilarious reveal till you see the movie- do not watch the trailer. You can see this trailer (Trailer 2) over at the official UK Burn After Reading site.

Great stuff- just stumbled across these…

I’m not claiming to know anything about marketing but, if I were in charge of the PR for a movie, I’d try my best to ensure that this kind of thing was sent directly to the people in a good position to show them to a lot of people at no cost, say… fan websites for example. I don’t know why I have to accidentally find them on the internet…

The official UK website for Burn After Reading is now live. It’s pretty sparse at the moment however. It contains only the UK trailer which is quite a lot different to the US ones and the character clips highlighting Chad, Harry, Linda and Osbourne. Also it confirms the UK release date of 17th October. www.burnafterreading.co.uk.