Critic Reviews

• Jon Frosch, The Atlantic

  The Coen brothers' new movie ranks with their very best in its nearly pitch-perfect balance of biting satirical humour and deep reserves of feeling.

• Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

  It's the movie's profound undercurrent of sadness that gets to you.

• Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

  The brothers have created a character who's hard to love and a bit of a chore to invest in for an hour and 45 minutes. Like the old songs in his repertoire, he's familiar, not new, but he quickly gets old and tiresome.

• Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice

  [A] marvelous, surreptitiously soulful movie ...

• Jordan Hoffman, Film.com

  One of the best and most understated movies about the grieving process.

• Dave Calhoun, Time Out

  The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

• Kent Turner, Film-Forward.com

  May be the Coens' saddest yet

• Guy Lodge, HitFix

  A wise, wintry ode to artistry lost, found and placed in storage.

• Craig Skinner, HeyUGuys

  Inside Llewyn Davis is a quiet triumph of a film.

• Fred Topel, CraveOnline

  If O Brother, Where Art Thou was loosely based on The Odyssey, I think Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers' Alice in Wonderland,

• Kevin Jagernauth, The Playlist

  Inside Llewyn Davis isn't about someone trying to make it big, but someone just trying to make it, and the Coens celebrate the hard road that can inspire great art.

• Jamie Graham, Total Film

  Melancholy and funny, quirky and touching, it stands among their strongest work.

• Tim Grierson, Screen International

  The filmmaking duo's new movie features a protagonist far more flawed and self-defeating, but thanks to a sterling lead performance from Oscar Isaac, the Coen brothers have once again delivered an impressively nuanced character study.

• Eric Kohn, indieWIRE

  An ode to art for art's sake, Inside Llewyn Davis is the most innocent movie of the Coens' career, which in their case is a downright radical achievement.

• Simon Gallagher, What Culture

  The film is thoughtful and evocative, just as the directorial duo's other period offerings, and to call it a low key affair, packed with charm is not to do the film any disservice.

• Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

  This is instant A-list Coens; enigmatic, exhilarating, irresistible.

• Shaun Munro, Film School Rejects

  While it might be their most slight and unfocused effort in almost ten years, given their corpus of work therein, it's difficult to feel too short-changed about that.

Read all 17 critic reviews