Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Subtle and surreptitiously soulful, Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest has a light, tender touch and a surfeit of sincere, deep feeling, two things the Coen brothers generally lack. A lot of the emotion comes from the music itself, supervised by T. Bone Burnett, a man who really knows his way around a ballad. The film is as melancholy as the somber, smoky, sweet songs filled with steely, blue notes, providing a startlingly straight-faced departure for the directing/writing/producing/editing duo behind Fargo, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, and Raising Arizona. Marvelous and mordantly funny, Inside Llewyn Davis is deeply personal, boldly original, and highly emotional.

The sounds of the early sixties folk music revival float in the air like a strange, intoxicating perfume, reflecting the lonesomeness and romance of the traveling life, particularly the meandering, fraught journey of a guitar-strumming balladeer trying to reconcile his life and his art. Oscar Isaac, who portrays the title character with sincere conviction and a haunting humanism, can definitely sing, in a fine, clear tenor voice that palpitates with the poignant pain of loss, longing, and loneliness. All of the songs speak to this pain and to the rootlessness and regret of his existence: “Fare Thee Well,” “Five Hundred Miles (Away From Home),” and especially “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” which opens the film: “wouldn’t mind the hangin’ except for layin’ in the grave so long, poor boy... I been all around this world.” The words and chords don’t just enrich the movie, they complete it, tapping into reservoirs of otherwise inaccessible feelings.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…  And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 

Baz Luhrnman’s The Great Gatsby is an audacious, fascinating technological and aesthetic experiment in expressionism, a “kaleidoscopic carnival,” to borrow Fitzgerald’s phrase, as bursting with bejeweled excess as its title character’s boozy parties, the cinematic equivalent of the biggest, craziest, loudest guest at a gathering where the confetti falls and the champagne flows like monsoon rain, and the twenties really roar their golden roar. Everything shines in baroque, brilliant, beautiful fakeness.

A lavish, splashy celebration of the extravagance of the Jazz Age, Gatsby is filled to the brim with the sort of stylistic gambits Luhrman fans have come to expect—epic, classic melodrama that blends old world theatrics with the newest in postmodernist subjective filmmaking, CGI cityscapes, anachronistic soundtrack mashups of period music and modern pop, psychological drama and speedy slapstick. But through the brightly-hued haze of acrobatic camera movements, opulent flowers, flappers, fringes, and frills, Luhrman’s reverence for his source material shines through like the blinking green beacon of light at the end of Daisy’s peer.