A Serious Man

The Coen brothers' film opens with a Yiddish folk-tale about a possible dybbuk, then follows a Minnesota physics professor through a year of undeserved catastrophe and three failed appointments with rabbis. It opens with a line of Rashi on screen: Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.

The counterweight the whole wing needs, and the best-behaved node in it. No sephirot, no diagram, no borrowed vocabulary — and it is more genuinely inside the tradition than anything else here, because it is about the actual religious problem: a good man, an incomprehensible affliction, and a community with procedures but no answer. The film is a Job midrash made by people who grew up in the shul, and its refusal to explain is the most orthodox thing in this corpus.