Review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) by Dmitryportnoy — 08 Dec 2013

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is a masterly work of exquisite beauty, rigorous discipline, and supreme confidence. The Coens have purged the violence of "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing," and "No Country for Old Men," the jokiness of "Raising Arizona," the grotesquery of "Barton Fink," the college-dorm philosophizing of "The Big Lebowski" and "A Serious Man," the cornball regionalism of "Fargo" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou"--in short, all of their trademarks as filmmakers--and the result? With all those crutches kicked away, this movie levitates in mid-air, as perfect as a pearl, priceless, graspable, mysterious, layered, aglow.

It demands to be seen in a theater, in the dark, with an audience that erupts in laughter, then lapses in rapt silence. With Woody Allen's "Manhattan," and William Friedkin's "The French Connection," it is also that rare cinematic portrait of New York worthy of its subject.