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.

Adopt-a-Movie Kindly Adopted by Peter Torr Smith

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