Barton Fink is packed full of symbolism, allegory, and open-ended questions. About one man's struggles as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the film is at once realism and surrealism; comedy and tragedy. Willing you to discern meaning behind images and lines, Joel and Ethan Coen tease the viewer with a multitude of possible interpretations of their story and its characters. Littered with references to other films, novels, and poems, the viewing experience is overwhelming but rewarding.

With exhilarating performances from John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, and Judy Davis, this is very much a character driven piece. Exploring the "life of the mind" from different angles, we are introduced to a variety of characters, each with their own issues and secrets.…

Barton Fink is a singular work in the Coen brothers canon. It's their most symbolically oriented movie, and the closest they've ever come to offering an artistic manifesto. The story of Barton Fink, earnest young 'playwright of the common man' who goes to Hollywood to write for the pictures and finds himself in a hell of his own making, doubles as a metaphor for the creative process. The Hollywood studio system, in the person of vulgarian studio head Jack Lipnick and broken, dipsomaniacal screenwriter Bill Mayhew, is shown to be the artistically bankrupt shit-factory we all know it to be, but the real revelation is that Fink, for all of his pretensions to Beauty through Truth, is as creatively crippled…