5. A Serious Man (2009)
It was very difficult for me to only include one Coen Brothers movie on this list but I had to go with A Serious Man even though No Country for Old Men seems like the better pick. While No Country is certainly a masterpiece, to me, A Serious Man represents the Coen's particular style of filmmaking better than No Country. The way they are able to mix pitch black humour with a great deal of emotional resonance is classic Coen Brothers. A Serious Man is a brilliant re-working of the Book of Job in the Bible and it is obviously a very personal story for the Coens given the fact that they are Jewish and raised in the Midwest just as all of the main characters are here. Their personality and passion is evident in every frame and really helps elevate the film to the status as a classic instead of a re-tread, which it easily could have been. The mix of humour and sorrow is well developed here and as equally well balanced. At no point do we ever feel that the characters in A Serious Man deserve our pity but instead we sympathize with him. Most dark comedies use their characters as punchlines to just have bad things happen to them but here they are used as real people facing real problems, which only serves to heighten the humour.