Review Roundup: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS -Out of the Box or on the Surface?

Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961 Llewyn Davis (Oscar Issac) is at a crossroads. Guitar in tow, huddled against the unforgiving New York winter, he is struggling to make it as a musician against seemingly insurmountable obstacles-some of them of his own making. Living at the mercy of both friends and strangers, scaring up what work he can find, Llewyn's misadventures take him from the baskethouses of the Village to an empty Chicago club-on an odyssey to audition for a music mogul-and back again.Brimming with music performed by Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan (as Llewyn's married Village friends), as well as Marcus Mumford and Punch Brothers, Inside Llewyn Davis-in the tradition of O Brother, Where Art Thou?-is infused with the transportive sound of another time and place. An epic on an intimate scale, it represents the Coen Brothers' fourth collaboration with multiple-Grammy® and Academy Award®-winning music producer T Bone Burnett. Marcus Mumford is associate music producer. (CBS Films)

Let's see what the critics have to say...

David Thomson, The New Republic: "Inside Llewyn Davis feels to me like a picture in which the brothers never got in such a hole they had to find a way of believing in their own material. It has a shrugging, routine moodiness. It never bites in the way, in No Country for Old Men, Bardem's Chigurh is a match for the devil and Tommy Lee Jones becomes the spirit of every disenchanted lawman in American cinema. The Coens are master storytellers even when they are doing junk. "

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "Though Davis clearly has the karma of someone who couldn't catch a break with both hands, "Inside" also reveals him to be a genuine artist willing to stoically suffer the cards dealt him if that's necessary to preserve his creative integrity. It's the film's empathy with him, its sympathy with the plight of artists in general, that makes "Inside" an unexpectedly emotional piece."

Scott Foundas, Variety: "Yet for all the pain in Inside Llewyn Davis, there is also abundant joy - the joy of the music itself, exquisitely arranged by T Bone Burnett and sung live on set by the actors themselves. Both dramatically and musically, the film excels at depicting the many varied styles that wound up grouped under the folk umbrella - from corny, Kingston Trio-esque harmonists to protest singers like Pete Seeger and self-proclaimed "neo-ethnics" such as Van Ronk. In keeping with the Coens' interest in matters of Jewish cultural identity, the pic also touches - but never dwells - on the folk scene's abiding spirit of self-reinvention, which allowed a Jewish doctor's son from Queens to become the singing cowboy Ramblin' Jack Elliott (a model for the movie's Al Cody, played by Adam Driver)."

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: "But the work's core and most brilliant filmmaking, as stunning and singular as anything in the Coens' canon, is embodied in what initially feels like a tangent that, among other things, can be viewed as a deadpan satire on the whole "on the road" ethos of the period, right down to the casting of Dean Moriarty himself, Garrett Hedlund, as the mostly mute driver on a hitchhiking trip Llewyn makes to Chicago. With John Goodman's sarcastic raconteur Roland Turner splayed across the back seat like a malignant combination of Henry VIII and Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, the trip proceeds into a surrealistic twilight zone. Although not decisive, the trip does present the artist with a defining moment the viewer is free to ignore or accept as the truth about what's "inside" Llewyn Davis."

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: "The film charts his downward spiral, and for a while I wondered: Why introduce a hero with talent only to mock his dreams? Yet the more I watched Inside Llewyn Davis, the more I saw that there is something indelible in the Coens' vision of a morosely gifted loser slipping through the cracks. When Llewyn goes into the studio to help record a satirical novelty song called 'Please Mr. Kennedy,' the movie seems to have the makings of an ebullient folk musical. But the Coens are way too sardonic for that. With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that - hauntingly - has shut their hero out."

Richard Corliss, TIME: "Llewyn remains something of a misfit in the Coen universe, where decent misfortunates (Billy Bob Thornton's betrayed husband in The Man Who Wasn't There, Michael Stulberg's hapless professor in A Serious Man) are easy marks for those with sharper instincts. Llewyn is more predatory than victimized; his angry flailing leaves collateral bruises on sympathetic bystanders. In the old definition of the Yiddish words schlemiel and schlimazel - the first being the fellow who always spills his soup, the second the guy he invariably spills it on - Llewyn is the schlemiel without a clue, and no cause but himself."

Jon Frosch, The Atlantic: "Along the way, Inside Llewyn Davis features one of the most sublime sequences the Coens have ever shot, involving a snowy highway in the middle of the night, that pesky cat Llewyn looks after, and a snippet of opera playing on the car radio. The film also flaunts a uniformly superb ensemble, with Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Jeanine Serralles, Max Casella, Stark Sands, F. Murray Abraham, Robin Martlett, and Adam Driver (of HBO's Girls) delivering jewel-like supporting performances."

Kyle Smith, New York Post: "Llewyn's an unpleasant fellow, author of most of his own misfortunes, and yet it's hard to be entirely cold to his several plights. He has musical talent. Just . . . not enough. For every Bob Dylan, there are a hundred Dave Van Ronks (the '60s folkie who, in part, inspired Llewyn). He isn't that special, and so he's like most of us. Who would begrudge him his bitter one-liners? The Coens, so cutting to so many of their characters, are gentler with Llewyn, inviting us to wander and wonder along with him as he ponders why he must forever play the jerk."

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