Having now seen it three times I deemed it time to pen a review. I have tried to make it as spoiler free as possible...

Where do I start? I cannot see this film enough! I've seen it three times now and it just keeps getting better. People think I'm nuts when I tell them that I've seen it three times but they are always people who haven't yet seen it. Once you've seen 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' you have a need, a real need, to see it again.

I honestly thought that this film may be the one to attract some box office, what with it starring some unknown called Clooney and having so much pre-release press, but I don't think this is going to be the case judging by the turnouts for the screenings I've attended. The first was on opening night, Friday September 15th at 17:50pm, and there were only 15 people in attendance and four of those were myself and three friends. I assume that the 20:30pm screening was better attended. The other two times there has been a similar number. Maybe Coen films are only ever going to appeal to the likes of you and me- people who aren't satisfied purely with big bangs and special effects.

The first thing that strikes you about 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' is that is it totally gorgeous. From the opening shot of a field full of crop to the last shot it is so beautifully filmed. Perhaps we expect this of the Coens, after all when did you ever see a more beautiful shot than the snow fall in The Hudsucker Proxy? But they have out done themselves here. All this and early word from Frances McDormand, that their next movie, provisionally titled, The Barber Project, is the most beautiful film she's ever seen and it is entirely shot in black and white.

I don't want to go into the plot here, out of respect for the people reading who aren't fortunate enough to have seen it yet, so I will only touch upon aspects of it that have already been widely written about. The basic premise is that Ulysses Everett McGill (Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnel (Nelson) have broken away from their chain gang in an attempt to reclaim a stash of treasure that Everett buried before his capture. The reason they could not wait is that the Hydro-Electric company is flooding the valley where it is buried in four days. A simple task having already escaped from the prison farm, you might think. Well, you'd do well to remember that this is Coen Land, where nothing is ever what it seems. Think back to Fargo, where a simple kidnap plot goes horribly wrong. Or Blood Simple, where so many misunderstandings and assumptions turn a relatively simple plot into a twisting, turning mess. Hell, even The Big Lebowski's plot, should have been plain sailing, were it not for dim-witted, pig-headed characters like Walter and the Dude- I mean leaving the money in the car while you bowl- I ask you?

Along the way to throw the inevitable spanners in the works the trio of escapees meet with all manner of evil. Ranging from a one-eyed, conniving, Bible salesman (John Goodman as the Homeric Cyclops), the Sirens (Mia Tate, Christy Taylor, and Musetta Vander), the Ku Klux Klan, countless run-ins with the bent Sheriff Cooley (Daniel Von Bargen), not to mention being used as a pawn in an election campaign by Governor Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning in fine form). As for the film being touted as a musical, I don't really see it that way. Sure it has plenty of songs, great songs, and the escapees do, indeed, sing the rousing hit, 'I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow', which forms the backbone of the tale, but it isn't a musical in the truest sense. There are no big dance numbers (unless you count Turturro's hilarious shuffling), no singing just for the hell of it. The songs chosen by T. Bone Burnett really carry the plot along. They are not intrusive and all seem to fit just right. With regard to the music there is no way I would normally listen to this kind of music but in the context of 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' it is all fantastic (even the melancholy 'Lonesome Valley'), but, by far and away, the best are the Soggy Bottom Boy's numbers- the aforementioned 'I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow' and 'In The Jailhouse Now' which features Tim Blake Nelson's real dulcet tones!

Every single actor in the movie performs brilliantly leaving with you so many memorable characters and leaving the questions, who was the best? and who was the funniest? unanswered. Definitely worth a mention are the main protagonists. Clooney is amazingly funny as the pomade-obsessed Everett, and it is refreshing to see a Hollywood A-lister in such a knock about comedy, playing it with such self-parody and disregard for cool. Tim Blake Nelson is a revelation as Delmar, with his constantly yellowing teeth, good heart and sweet naivete, he is instantly loveable. Turturro's Pete on the other hand, seems like a bit of an angry-head right from the off, but eventually turns into a hilarious, good-natured character. Of the rest of the cast there is so many worthy of a mention. Holly Hunter as Penny Wharvey, Everett's ex-wife, Charles Durning as Governor Pappy O'Daniel, Wayne Duvall as Homer 'Friend Of The Little Man' Stokes, Daniel Von Bargen as Sheriff Cooley, Stephen Root as the WEZY radio shack manager, Michael Badalucco as the manic depressive George 'Babyface' Nelson, and, of course, John Goodman's Big Dan Teague. Every one playing their parts so well, so comically and so believably. Hats off to the casting choices and it is great to see the Coen's using regulars again (a shame though that there was no part of Steve Buscemi).

Of all the films I've ever seen this one, 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?', displays more heart than any. Sure it's a comedy, dare I say it, musical but it is so nice for want of a better word. Even the criminals in it were found guilty of minor crimes. All the characters (excpet maybe, Pappy) have a good heart and are only trying to make life better for their loved ones. Everett wants to reconcile with the ex and live as a family with her and his 6, no 7, little girls, Pete wants to buy a restaurant and Delmar wants to buy back the family farm from the "foreclosing sons of guns down at the bank". You leave the cinema with three, very distinct, feelings, the first is that you must see it again, the second is one of happiness having just seen as ace comedy and the third is that the world isn't all bad, it isn't full of death and war like CNN would have us believe. It can be a beautiful place, filled with love. Not that there was ever any doubt, but the Coen brothers have not let us down. They've delivered an amazingly funny, beautiful, well acted, well written masterpiece. Here's looking forward to the (hopefully extra laden) DVD!

The Coens tackle the Odyssey. Peter Bradshaw reports from the Cannes film festival Monday May 15, 2000

At the apex of the Cannes film festival's all-important first weekend, Joel and Ethan Coen's broad and hyperactive comedy of the deep south was unveiled. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a zany Depression tale - claiming kinship with both Homer's Odyssey and Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels - about three Mississippi chain gang prisoners on the run and looking for buried loot. They meet a hitch-hiker called Tommy who claims to have sold his soul to the devil to play blues guitar, and together the outlaws cut a bluegrass record, which becomes a smash hit while the escapees hightail it across the swampy terrain pursued by the familiar lawmen with their traditional reflecting sunglasses and slobbering bloodhounds.

George Clooney is the ringleader, Everett Ulysses McGill, perpetually fussing with his pomade and hair net and sporting a raffish, faintly Mediterranean moustache. It is strange to see him in another three-guys-and-a-treasure-map movie so soon after Three Kings. He is maturing as a comic performer, however, and he carries the picture with virility and brio. Unlike many a TV-bred name, he has somehow developed the mass and dimensions of a big-screen romantic lead or action hero. But sadly John Turturro as Pete, one of his two sidekicks, is a bit dull and unresponsive, his face permanently stuck in a good ol' boy expression.

O Brother takes its Homeric duties fairly seriously, with sirens tempting our boys and Everett finally returning to his faithless Penelope, played by Holly Hunter. But the parallels don't add much and 30s Mississippi is a pretty dry comic landscape compared with, say, 1912 Dublin. The Coens' Sturges homage resides in the chain-gang details, and the moments in the picture show and old-time religion congregation, but it does not exactly match or develop Sturges's view of what real poverty is and what real film-makers can really do about it. That said, O Brother has enormous gaiety and a terrific soundtrack, and deserves its overwhelming position as the "choice of the Croisette" - Cannes's feel-good movie.

EMPIRE Review: 5 Stars

Preston Sturges' 1941 classic Sullivan's Travels sees conscience-stricken director Sullivan (Joel McCrea) torn between the studio's wish that he make a crass feelgood musical and his own desire to do a true-to-life drama of rural injustice and misery called O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sixty years on, the Coen brothers have picked up Sullivan's title and run with it, repeating the Sturges trick of delivering both social realism and magical entertainment.

Like most Coen movies, it isn't quite the way they used to make them, but is deeply in love not just with the films of the past, but all of popular culture, from product packaging (principally Dapper Dan hair pomade) through period pop music to modes of dress and politics. Though its downhome numbers are states away from the glamour of vintage Hollywood, this even manages to be the nearest thing to a real feelgood musical the movies have pulled off in years. While earlier Coen movies pay homage to Dashiell Hammett (Blood Simple, 1983), William Faulkner (Barton Fink, 1991) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Lebowski, 1998), the touchstone here is short story-writer and fabulist Howard Waldrop (who has a character named after him). In his novel, A Dozen Tough Jobs, Waldrop retold the story of Hercules in the rural South in the 1920s. Here, the Coens use the Waldropian approach by replaying the story of Ulysses' long journey home from the Trojan Wars to Ithaca against the backdrop of Depression-era Mississippi.

Our heroes are: Ulysses Everett McGill, a fast-talking, fastidious wiseguy who says he's after treasure but really wants to get back together with his wife, Penny, and brood of daughters; Delmar, a slow-witted tag-along who wants to buy back the family farm from the bank; and Pete, a tearaway with ambitions to be a maitre d'. On their trail is a typical Coen demon villain, posse-leader Cooley (Daniel Von Bargen), and in the background is an electoral contest between the genially corrupt incumbent Governor, Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning), and the reform-minded Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall). Along the way, they fall in with Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King) - a bluesman who has swapped his soul for musical talent, which leads the runaways into a profitable detour as a recording sensation - and manic depressive gunman George Nelson, who hates cows as much as cops.

Confidently cinematic in classical and modern terms, layered with subtleties but also a straight-ahead, crowd-pleasing comedy, with more witty lines and bits of visual imagination than a dozen regular movies, O Brother is where thou shouldst be.

KIM NEWMAN Issue 136 October 2000

GUARDIAN review

Peter Bradshaw Friday September 15, 2000

Films by the Coen brothers have always inhabited their own richly, eccentrically imagined universe, but never before have they found one to accommodate such a wealth of unselfconscious fun. O Brother, Where Art Thou? has brio, wit, and style, and the whole picture is air-cushioned with appealing comedy and its own unassuming good nature. Simply: this is a film which is impossible to dislike, and moves with an easy, approachable swing through the bleached and steaming landscape of bluegrass Mississippi, with its ornery confidence men and cracker-barrel politicians. It's a film to tap your feet to, in every sense: not perhaps so easy with some of the brothers' early work, composed as it has been in 5/4 and 7/8 time signatures.

George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson play Everett, Pete and Delmar, three sweaty convicts in the South during the Depression, who bust off the chain gang and go on the run. They are looking for the treasure that the smooth-talking Everett assures them he has got hidden, from the job that landed him in jail in the first place. In the course of this hunt, they find treasure of a different sort: in a ramshackle recording studio, the errant trio pass themselves off as The Soggy Bottom Boys and make a blues record, which becomes a smash hit.

In his wanderings, Everett assumes a sort of Odyssean status, and the Coens whimsically present their movie as the loosest and most amiable kind of Homeric epic, with - amongst other nudges - our heroes being seduced from their path by Sirens, meeting a sinister Cyclops in the form of the one-eyed Bible-salesman Big Dan Teague (John Goodman) and Everett finally returning to his Penelope in the form of his long-suffering wife Penny (Holly Hunter). And in the Homeric spirit, quite a few of the dramatis personae are blind, or partially blind. But there is a more pressing and relevant form of ancestor worship: screwballmeister Preston Sturges, whose 1942 classic, Sullivan's Travels, was about a director of light comedies, who longs to make a harrowingly earnest "message" picture about social injustice called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

One of the distinctive successes of the Coens' O Brother is the way it has managed to channel some of the spirit of Sturges in its zany dialogue and galloping pace, also cloning some of the earlier film's defining moments: the old-time religion, the prison farm, the "church parade" of convicts watching a movie. The anxiety of influence is felt much more strongly from Sturges than the 3,000-year-old Greek poet.

This is far from being George Clooney's first comedy role. In his younger, bigger-haired days, he was a veteran of Roseanne and dozens of unsuccessful sitcom pilots. In this film, he produces a novel, raffish charm as the silver-tongued rogue, and a certain old-fashioned masculine mass and substance, which he wears lightly, but in such a way as to signal unmistakablyhis arrival in the big-screen big league. Here, Clooney manages to combine a little of Clark Gable with a whisper of Cary Grant's early incarnation as a vaudevillian stage comic. As for his supporting men: Tim Blake Nelson gets to sing his own blues numbers (Clooney's voice is dubbed by Dan Tyminski). John Turturro's face is stuck in an expression of baffled disapproval, his jaw twisted round to make his face shaped like a J. Clooney is very much the leader of the pack. But all three find their feet in this baroque, distinctive world, which the Coens devise with such intricate charm.

Borges has a short story about a writer whose chef d'oeuvre is a multi-volume encyclopaedia about an imaginary universe; the Coens write one of these every time they make a movie. To take just one of the many flecks and touches: when Clooney can't get hold of a can of Dapper Dan, his preferred brand of hair-cream, he is piqued to be offered another, absurdly called Fop. One of many happy inventions.

The only reservation I would maintain about O Brother is that the invocation of Preston Sturges reminds us that, somewhere amidst the wackiness, Sullivan's Travels actually had serious things to say about real poverty and what real film-makers can really do about it. For all its accomplishment, there is nothing in the Coens' film which speaks of this concern. But it is made with marvellous clarity and fluency, and Joel and Ethan Coen attain a comic simplicity that other film-makers can only dream of.

FILM UNLIMITED review

This mixed-nut movie is so endlessly entertaining that one can forgive it anything, reckons Xan Brooks Friday September 15, 2000

Film-making is a family affair as far as the Coen Brothers are concerned. Ethan writes and Joel directs. Fittingly, O Brother, Where Art Thou arrives with a sibling-themed title, not to mention two important father figures in the wings. On the one hand, the Coens audaciously credit Homer (the Greek, not Simpson) for their screenplay. On the other, their film takes its title from the unfilmed Depression-era saga that Joel McCrea's director in Preston Sturges's Hollywood satire Sullivan's Travels wants to make.

In the meantime, the interior fairly teams with a host of Coen regulars (John Goodman, John Turturro, Holly Hunter, Charles Durning et-al). For the viewer, the abiding impression is one of being invited to a riotous gathering of blood relations; of being an entranced observer as opposed to an active participant. Still, it makes for quite a party, this ensemble field trip through a storybook American South. The template is Homer's The Odyssey (right down to the cyclops and sirens), but there's more than a dash of Mark Twain to the proceedings too. O Brother is a broad, exuberant picaresque in the Huck Finn mode (right down to the knockabout swipes at lynch-mob USA). It opens up with the waddling, three-legged escape of a trio of chain-gang convicts - rakish Everett (George Clooney), pensive Pete (Turturro) and dopey Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), and proceeds to chart their course through a hectic series of misadventures. Our motley crew are conned by a squinting Bible salesman (Goodman), hounded by a down home politician (Durning), and re-invented as "the Soggy Bottom Boys"; purveyors of a bluegrass 78 that's electrifying the Mississippi airwaves. But this freewheeling film steers a dangerous course.

You sense that O Brother is so corn-fed on invention, so bundled with ideas that it could come a-cropper at any stage. Inevitably, it leaves some casualties in its wake, and some of the players struggle to make their presence felt. Goodman, for instance, is caught on baleful auto-pilot, Hunter looks something of a wallflower as Everett's long-suffering wife, and even Turturro looks a shade uncomfortable at times. The pacing, too, can be maddeningly skittish. The Coens keep veering off to take in an interesting sight, losing their way momentarily, and dragging the whole circus along with them. But oh (brother), there's much to marvel at as well. Take Clooney, who plays Everett as a love-child of Ronald Coleman and Clark Gable with his card-sharp grin, pomaded hair and clipped screwball delivery. Or Durning's splendidly sleazy turn as the unscrupulous Pappy O'Daniel (Pappy was a real figure, by the way: a populist 1930s senator who combined political duties with managing his own radio station). Or the parched cinematography (courtesy of Roger Deakins). Or the music itself, that keening rush of rough-edged blues that bursts over the picture like a shower in the summertime.

So yeah, I loved it, this jubilant jumble of a movie. True, O Brother lacks Fargo's chill, disciplined kookiness, and misses out on Lebowski's freakish flamboyance, and could use a polish here and there. But let's not get too picky. In the end, this mixed-nut movie is so endlessly entertaining that one can forgive it anything. Make like Cyclops, and turn a blind eye on its occasional excesses.

Consistency of this calibre is a hard thing to come by in modern moviemaking, but those smarty-pants Coens just never let us down. In true madcap-genius fashion, they have spliced Homer's Odyssey with Preston Sturges and Depression-era America and come up with a road movie-cum-screwball comedy. Its simplicity of structure - three chaingang escapees head home via a series of classically-themed misadventures - belies nods toward the birth of rock 'n' roll, smalltown politics and the eteral strife between mystical forces of good and evil. Visually delightful - the Klan rally filmed as a huge musical number is both unique and majestically brilliant - it's scripted with their typically unflagging clever-cleverness and performed with a live wire energy by new boys and old-hands alike.

Tonally, it comes somewhere betwixt Raising Arizona (1987) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), but has a lush sunburnt look we've never seen before. With their annual output now as eagerly anticipated as the of Woody Allen, the Coen brothers are cinema's most precious gift: unbending auteurs and cultural magpies, who find poetry in tins of hair-wax and livestock marooned on rooftops. Cherish them.

The menu: Film stills are set up in a framed sepia montage, each one making a gurgling quote from the movie as they are clicked.

DVD extras: Nothing to write home about: a series of cast and crew soundbites (certainly not interviews) from promotional footage, warranting one viewing only. Trailers and TV spots fill it out, but this is really a token filler.

The film: Three convicts on the run in '30s Mississippi meet blind prophets, washerwomen sirens and cycloptic Bible-bashers in the Coen brothers' bluegrass take on Homer's Odyssey. Not an all-time classic, but inventive fun nonetheless, with George Clooney twitching and double-taking like mad as vain and verbose Ulysses Everett McGill.

The extras: Cast and crew interviews, trailer, TV spots.

The verdict: The Coen's sepia-tinted cinematography has never looked better than when etched onto a lovely, shiny disc but - that apart - there aren't many reasons to cough up the extra for the DVD instead of the vid. The trailer and TV spots are a bare-bones minimum for any DVD these days, while the zero-revelation cast and crew interviews are just dull telly show inserts. The list of potential extras for a Coen brothers film is hugs. So where are they, eh?