If fortune truly favours the brave, it's no surprise that the hen-pecked, mild-mannered mensch at the centre of Joel and Ethan Coen’s new black comedy A Serious Man is pummelled senseless by bad luck. Set in a Jewish community in mid-1960s Minneapolis reminiscent of the film-maker brothers’ childhood, the film is a deceptively simple portrait of a family in crisis, distinguished by a sharp script and terrific ensemble cast.

Following the unbearable tension of No Country For Old Men and the frippery of Burn After Reading, this new picture finds the Coens in the quirky hinterland they explored in The Big Lebowski. The seeds of foreboding blossom during a deliciously dark, Yiddish-language prologue set in a 19th-century Polish shtetl. In this small Jewish village, a couple come face-to-face with a dybbuk (an evil spirit from folklore), which curses them for eternity. The self-contained vignette has no bearing on the rest of the film, but neatly introduces the themes of passivity and misfortune.

University physics lecturer Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is knocked for six when wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces she wants a divorce so she can marry their mutual friend Sy (Fred Melamed).

The children don’t appear fussed: daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) only wants her father around to pay for a nose job, while teenage son Danny (Aaron Wolff) just needs him to fiddle with the aerial on the roof so they can receive his favourite television programme.

Adding to poor Larry’s woes, one of his Asian students (David Kang) seems to think he can bribe his way to a passing grade, and his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is making a nuisance of himself at all hours of the day with a troublesome sebaceous cyst. Unable to make contact with the chief rabbi, Larry tries to sort out the problems himself – but every good deed only leads to more misery.

A Serious Man drops us into the mounting devastation of Larry’s once-idyllic life as, one by one, all of the people closest to him push him away. Even the chief rabbi refuses to see him. Stuhlbarg adopts a permanent look of incredulity as his caring family man struggles to make sense of the cards that life has dealt him. The supporting cast vividly bring their roles to life as the Coens add flecks of humour, some of them causing us to wince almost as much as the characters.

In the early 1990s, family man Mark Whiteacre decided to blow the whistle on a global price-fixing scam in the agricultural industry by turning informant for the FBI. FBI agents were delighted as the case slowly but surely took shape, but there was something that their star witness was keeping from them. Great swathes of his testimony and his snippets of insider information were the product of a fertile and overly-active imagination. He also neglected to mention about $9m in embezzled funds – one of the perks of his position as a company vice-president.

Steven Soderbergh recounts this incredible true story of bluff and bluster in The Informant!, adapted by Scott Z. Burns from Kurt Eichenwald’s book of the same name. The film is a fascinating and at times amusing true story about an everyman who pulled the wool over the eyes of the US government’s most highly-trained officers.

Matt Damon — shrugging off his Jason Bourne image — gained 30lb and a moustache for the role, delivering a tour de force as a man lost in his own web of lies, deceit and insider dealing.