Metacritic reviews

It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.

It's a pinball arcade of a flick -- the Coens invent a bunch of wonderfully flaky characters, stick them into a Plexiglas narrative, and let them bounce off each other.

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

Viewers with a taste for bizarre, even surreal, humor will have a ball.

It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself.

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.

Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

If it's all supposed to be in fun, why does it feel so much like an insult?