Katherine Borowitz

Shot in black and white as an homage to film noir, The Man Who Wasn't There (no relation to the Steve Guttenberg movie of the same name) tells the tale of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton, sporting a veritable work of art on his head as a toupee), a mild mannered, chain-smoking barber in sleepy 1940s Santa Rosa, California. As Ed's life consists of cutting the same heads of hair day in and day out, he can be forgiven for a little dissatisfaction with his life.

Continue reading: The Man Who Wasn't There Review

In their deeply ironic yet habitually impish, beautifully black-and-white 1950s drama "The Man Who Wasn't There," writing-directing brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have revived the dry, laconic spirit of prototypical film noir and applied it to the life of an everyday barber.

True, he's an everyday barber mixed up in the blackmail and murder of his cheating wife's boss and lover. But he's such an obscure, detached shadow of a man that the whole mess feels almost workaday mundane. You see, it's not his wife's affair that motivates the man. "It's a free country," he says in the movie's soporific, quietly sonorous running voice-over. It's the fact that he figures blackmail is a good way to get $10,000 out of the boyfriend so he can invest in some new-fangled invention called dry cleaning.

The barber, named Ed Crane, is played with brilliant reserve by Billy Bob Thornton, who has the most subtly expressive, heavily crevassed film noir face to smoke a dangling cigarette since Humphrey Bogart. He hardly registers a distinguishable emotion in 116 minutes, yet his passive soul fills the screen as Ed's plans go badly awry.

Continue reading: The Man Who Wasn't There Review