The Killing (1956, directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Peppered with gun moles, hard boiled tough guys, a dastardly racetrack robbery, a devious femme fatale (Marie Windsor, who lives the role), and a host of some of the best noir dialogue you’ll ever hear (“You like money. You’ve got a great big dollar sign where most women have a heart!”) “The Killing” probably fits in better with its genre – film-noir, if you hadn’t guessed – than another film Stanley Kubrick ever made.
The film takes a non-linear look at a robbery, orchestrated by Johnny Clay, a just-out-of-prison, mean sunofagun, at a local racetrack for the tidy sum of two million dollars – “If I’m gonna commit crimes again, there gonna be worth committing”, or something to that effect, Clay says at one point. To pull this ambitious heist he puts together a host of misfits and part-time criminals. One of these men, George Beatty (played by Elisha Cook Jr. – who, after watching this, I think William H. Macy has been trying to channel for his entire career), makes the mistake of telling his wife, the two-timing Sherry Peatty (Windsor); she, in turn, gets her boyfriend into the mix and, well, you can imagine the plan gets pretty royally fucked.
Kubrick’s intense attention to detail is noticeable immediately, though, as I stated earlier, this is Kubrick doing major genre work. It figures that it’s universally considered one of the best of all time, Kubrick could seemingly do no wrong when it came to working within, and subsequently eviscerating, a studied genre (he was quoting once as saying that one day he’d like to make a porno, just to show them how it’s done). If you’re a Kubrick or noir fan, this is a no-brainer; if, for some reason, you are not a fan of either of those things, you’ll probably have trouble seeing what all the fuss over The Killing is about – aside from maybe the Reservoir Dogs-ian structure.

A Serious Man (2009, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen)

We go from Kubrick to a couple of Kubrick-obsessed filmmakers with the seriously awesome “A Serious Man”. Larry Gropnick (played the perfectly-faced Michael Stuhlbarg), a timid, Midwest physics professor, sees the threads of his life begin to pull apart with the announcement that his wife is planning on leaving him (but no hanky-panky has occurred, Gropnick is certain) for a neighbor.
The Coens’, this being probably their most personal movie to date and, certainly, the most Jewish focused since Barton Fink, are masters of putting their protagonists through the ringer, and A Serious Man is no exception. Larry gets the “Job” treatment, having every aspect of his life and faith tested to the point that he can find solace in nothing and he begins to confuse his dreams with reality.
The Coens, possibly my all-time favorite filmmakers, are on their game here in a big way; this is most certainly their show. The setting (a Minneapolis suburb where they grew up), the characters (their father was also a University professor) and the themes can all be traced back to their youth and previous films. A Serious Man is another fantastic film for their already flooring canon.