Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius behind Stewie Griffin.

Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.

On the face of it, The Infidel should be a hoot. The screenwriting debut of comic David Baddiel, one half of two of the cleverest comedy duos of the past 20 years (Newman and Baddiel, Baddiel and Skinner), and starring stand-up comedian Omid Djalili, it tells the story of a Muslim who discovers after his mother’s death that he was adopted and his birth parents were Jewish.

If you stick with the Coen Brothers' new film until the end of the final credit crawl, you will notice the legend, in small print, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." I wouldn't be so sure: they certainly put their hero through the trials of Job. With a title like that, it ought to be a comedy, but the Coens customarily keep a protective, ironic distance from their fictional creations, and so you never really quite know where you stand with them. Still, A Serious Man may be their most personal, most revealing movie yet.