(“The rabbi is busy,” Marshak’s secretary tells him repeatedly.) Like the best of the Coens’ work, “A Serious Man” is darkly comic, absurd and well-acted, and it contends with the huge ...

Bloomington, Minnesota, 1967: Jewish physics lecturer Larry Gopnik is a serious and a very put-upon man. His daughter is stealing from him to save up for a nose job; his pot-head son, who gets ...