An interesting black joke from the Coen brothers, who gave us Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing.

Here they dump a much-lauded young Jewish playwright (John Turturro) into the entertainment-oriented Hollywood of 1941.

But the film's not only a satire of life in a poverty row studio of the war years, but a dark little number about Fink's run-down hotel, whose wallpaper peels obscenely in the heat from cardboard-thin walls, and whose only inhabitants are a red-eyed bellboy (Steve Buscemi, clearly auditioning for Renfield in Coppola's Dracula) and an aged liftman who never says anything but the number of the floor.

Here Fink meets writer's block, as well as a moose of a man (John Goodman) in the room next door.

He's also due to encounter violent death, a towering inferno and, maybe, a head in a hatbox.

It's a black comedy that doesn't actually give you much to laugh about, just a shade too clever and perverse for its own good.