The Coen brothers have built a long successful career on irreverent tragicomedies and pseudo-period pieces rife with beleaguered protagonists and oddball characters. Barton Fink is both of those things and yet something more: a satire of the artifice of studio-era filmmaking and a scathing condemnation of artistic self-delusion.

Playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) travels to Los Angeles to write scripts for a film studio in Hollywood. What he experiences there shakes him to his core, forcing him to confront not only the limitations of his chosen profession, but that of his worldview and self-conception. Anchored by powerful supporting performances by John Goodman and Judy Davis, not to mention a phenomenal climax sequence that must be seen to believe, Barton Fink is one of the oddest and most extraordinary films in the Coen brothers' entire oeuvre, and that's really saying something. -- Toussaint Egan