O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Ostensibly based on Homer’s The Odyssey, the latest Coen brothers film follows the misadventures of one smooth-talking felon called Ulysses (George Clooney) on the run from a Dust Bowl-era chain gang with two dim-witted fellow cons (John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson). Along the way the convicts meet a blind soothsayer, a cyclopean Bible salesman and a trio of seductive sirens, all obstacles in the path to Ulysses’ true goal—preventing the imminent re-marriage of his beloved Penelope (Holly Hunter). A delirious prairie-twister tour through the Coens’ vision of 1930s Mississippi.