A Serious Man (2009)

The Coen brothers' Job, set in a Minnesota suburb in 1967, opening with a Yiddish folk tale about a possible dybbuk that the film never explains or connects to anything that follows.

The best modern film about the moment a tradition's machinery stops answering. Three rabbis, no answers, and a parking lot. ⚠ Kept here rather than in the reception wing because its subject is not what people did with the Kabbalah — it is what it feels like when the whole apparatus declines to speak.