you never go wrong with the coen brothers

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2014)

it looks like it is time to start talking about some of the Oscar candidates, before the awards get here quickly. my main disclaimer is being a fanatic of anything coming out of coen brothers' imagination or captured by their lenses, which is a serious caveat when trying to analyze objectively any of their masterpieces.
Inside Llewyn Davis is a story based on a period of the singer dave van ronk's life, and his battle to triumph in the music scene of the 60's in the Village. the dark humor of of the coen clan is present as ever, even though in this movie the "dark" part of it overrides the "humor" part, because, despite the usual genial bits of irony/sarcasm, the environment of this movie is itself covered with a blanket of clouds on the artistic growth of a struggling musician.
Oscar isaac excels in his performance and both justin timberlake and carey mulligan are good highlights to the cast without compromising. in summary, this movie has everything the coen brothers got us used to, dialogs, cinematography, soundtrack, everything nearing perfection. in terms of cinema, the coen are like that person that comes and tucks us into bed when we're on the verge of entering dream zone.
p.s.: there is a Portuguese proverb that says "it is hard to please greeks and Trojans at the same time". even though that is true for movies during the awards season, the fact this movie is not nominated to the Oscar of best picture (in a time of nine or ten nominees) or best adapted screenplay, is in itself telling of the strange criteria of some of these nominations.