Man Who Wasn't There, The

Aroview: The Coen Brothers chalk up another film in love with film, an attractive but slender paean to 1950s pulp melodramas, with its nostalgia-soaked period design framed in the best black-and-white photography money can buy.

Its story of a modest, laconic barber who blackmails the lover of his adulterous wife is seemingly caught between (film noir) genre conventions and a self-conscious obligation to do something different with them. The quality dialogue and heartily-played character-types are still head-and-shoulders above their protégés, and though it might add up to less than the sum of these parts, the dark horse charisma of Billy Bob Thornton commands attention throughout.

more matches…