PHOTOS: Behind the scenes of movies and TV 
 
 All this singing placed a special burden on the sweet-voiced cast, which includes Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake, but especially on Juilliard-trained Isaac, who had to be both believable as a musician and a good enough actor to appear in every scene, a task so daunting the Coens despaired of finding anyone who could play the part until he walked in the door. Placing its aesthetic cards on the table immediately, "Inside" opens with Davis, alone at the microphone in the Village's Gaslight Club, singing a full three-minute version of "I've Been All Around This World," a mournful tune often known by its chorus of "Hang me, oh hang me, I'll be dead and gone." As Joel Coen admitted in Cannes, being one of the brothers' protagonists is "not for the weak of heart." Davis, we soon understand, is going through a rough patch. Yes, Llewyn is an incorrigible screw-up, having, among other things, impregnated a friend who also happens to be the wife of another friend, two halves of the very palatable-to-the-mainstream female/male singing duo Jean and Jim (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). After defiantly telling his sister that, no, he won't be going back to the Merchant Marine for a stint at sea, he impulsively joins—with cat in tow—a dyspeptic, shambling jazz musician and his doggerel-mumbling beatnik "valet" (John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund, respectively) on an ill-fated road trip to Chicago. Llewyn Davis is a complex, contradictory character who sometimes does the worst things for the best reasons and comes alive most fully, most appealingly, only when he sings.
– The Coen brothers' latest film tells the dark tale of a folk musician in Greenwich Village in 1961. Though you might not want to befriend Llewyn, his story is well worth a watch—in fact, some critics are calling Inside Llewyn Davis a candidate for the Coens' best. A sampling of reviews: "While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made Inside Llewyn Davis echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of (the brothers') best films," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Its "sympathy with the plight of artists in general" makes the film "an unexpectedly emotional piece." Andrew O'Hehir has "already heard from people who haven’t enjoyed this movie because they found couch-surfing, folk-purist, arrogant Llewyn too unpleasant a character to spend two hours in his company," he writes at Salon. But star Oscar Isaac offers "the year’s breakout performance," and the movie is "one of the Coens’ richest, strangest, and most potent." At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny says the film has "the most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet." It's "full of devastating scenes. And full of quick, devastating observations." Inside Llewyn Davis is as "enigmatic" as its lead character, writes Claudia Puig in USA Today. It's also "brilliantly acted, gorgeously shot and altogether captivating," offering "sly humor and a profound undercurrent of tragedy."