“It’s never new but it never gets old — it’s a folk song.”

Inside Llewyn Davis has a lot in common with the folk music genre: It’s endearing and beautiful at times but slow and sorrowful at others. In the spirit of folk music, we’ve decided to harmonize on this review — two voices in unison. We’ll be passing around the hat afterward.

Rob: The film depicts the Greenwich Village folk scene in the pre-Dylan era, a time when the movement had lost much of its cohesiveness and was struggling to stay relevant as pop music dominated the charts. Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen present 1961 as a dark time for “serious” folk artists who were determined to keep their craft from falling by the wayside. And apparently, some of them coped with this new reality by becoming straight-up jerks.

Eric: The only thing worse than an asshole who has convinced himself he's an artist is an asshole who actually is an artist. It’s shame to see talent wasted on someone who’s such a miserable human being. That’s Llewyn Davis, a guy who shows more emotion to a stray cat than the people who (somehow) love him. Singing is the only way Llewyn can really reach out to other humans, and it pays the bills, which are pretty much nonexistent since he's homeless and lives on a diet of bummed cigarettes.

Rob: Llewyn has problems taking responsibility for pretty much anything. He drifts around New York, crashing on one friend’s couch after another. He neglects his family. He writes checks to pay for one-night stands’ abortions and just walks away without a second thought. He’s a total deadbeat, even if he sometimes means well.

Eric: We follow scumbag Llewyn around for a week of public transportation, dingy clubs, and run-down apartments. Pretty quickly it starts to seem like a male-centric Girls set in the ‘60s — not only because the lead character is young, self-important egomaniac who treats his friends like garbage and has convinced himself anyone not doing what he’s doing has sold out and those who are doing it aren’t doing it right (“What do you think of these guys?” a club owner asks Llewlyn of an a capella quartet. “I like their sweaters.”) but because two of the three gents from Girls (Adam Driver and Alex Karpovsky) show up in the first 30 minutes of the film. The supporting cast here is fantastic, and in typical Coen fashion, the kooky characters we meet for just one scene are as fascinating as the lead. 

Rob:  Let’s not forget Carey Mulligan, who turns in an enjoyable Holly Hunter-esque performance as one of Llewyn’s aforementioned one-night stands. (If there’s one thing the Coens have perfected over the course of their canon, it’s their trope of hilariously exasperated female characters who are fed up with the stupid men in their lives. God, there are a lot of dumb men in Coen movies.) 

But unfortunately the Coen personality shines through only occasionally in Inside Llewyn Davis, in a few great moments that spotlight those oddball characters. In my favorite scene of the film, Llewyn sits in on a recording session with fellow folksters played by Driver and Justin Timberlake, jamming out on a gimmicky pop song about JFK and the space race.

Eric: That was whole bit was hilarious. It’s a shame all these colorful characters but get so little screen time — it’s all about Llewyn (which, I suppose makes sense given the title of the film). But, I would have been happy to see some more from Driver and Timberlake’s characters and Stark Sands, who plays Llewyn’s exact opposite: a painfully optimistic young soldier with a potentially promising folk career ahead of him. 

We do, however, get a hefty dose of John Goodman as surly old jazz man named Roland and his silent, chain-smoking valet Johnny Five, played perfectly by Garrett Hedlund (the lead from Tron: Legacy). Their time together gives some hilarious breaks from the heartbreak that surround Llewyn and his self-inflicted suffering. There’s a perfect blend of sad and funny when Roland and Llewyn talk about the suicide of Llewyn’s performing partner.

Rob: In another of Roland’s (drunken? heroin-fueled?) rants, he points out an interesting contrast between folk singers, whose music he considers lazy and dumbed-down, and jazz musicians who “play all the notes on the scale.”

Eric: Man, I was silently cheering Roland in that scene. I tend to hate folk music — the capos and the boring chords and the uninteresting suburban kids thinking they have something to say. Ugh. But even if the genre doesn’t do much for you because every d-bag you know with an acoustic guitar has turned you off of amateur solo performers, it’s impossible not to get silenced and swept up by Llewyn’s takes on these classic folk songs. The earnest, simple songs are mimicked in the film’s visuals — muted like the calm strum of steel strings. Every frame looks like it could be the cover of a folk album. Like, say, this one from Bob Dylan.

Rob: Dylan’s shadow looms large over the film. We know he’ll soon end up breathing new life into a lot of the old standards Llewyn solemnly performs for half-empty clubs — and he’ll have a lot more fun doing it. Will folk’s looming resurgence save Llewyn from his gloomy mope-fest and break him out of his endless loop of self-destruction? Or will it just be another instance of opportunity passing him by?

Eric: Oh, I know! Or, maybe I don’t — wouldn’t want to spoil the ending. Though I’m not sure I could if I tried. It’s worth mentioning this is character-heavy stuff, so don’t go in expecting oodles of plot. Still, I think if you like the Coen Bros. and the absence of a major story doesn’t completely turn you off, you’ll agree this selection is a fine addition to the Coen’s songbook.

--Rob Heidrick and Eric Pulsifer

Time travel and romantic comedy might not seem like a natural pairing, but writer/director Richard Curtis successfully merges the two genres to great effect in About Time.

The film explores the idea that falling in love is essentially the outcome of a series of good and bad decisions, imagining what it would be like if you could go back and erase all the awkward missteps along the way.

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) is a well-meaning but decidedly un-suave romantic whose attempts to find a girlfriend have resulted in lifelong frustration. One morning, his father (Bill Nighy) reveals to Tim that he, like all the men in his family before him, possesses the ability to travel through time.

After getting over his initial shock, the endearingly clumsy ginger is given a crash course on the ins and outs of his ability: By shutting himself in a dark space, closing his eyes, and clenching his fists, Tim can shift back to any moment in his own past. He can’t go back before his own birth, and although he can leap back from the past to the present, he cannot travel beyond that point into the future.

Now, any plot involving time travel is bound to be convoluted to some degree, and Curtis has fun acknowledging and embracing that necessity. In response to Tim’s concerns about the catastrophic consequences of meddling with the past, his dad wryly tells him, “Oh, the butterfly effect? Well, we haven’t destroyed the universe yet!” He also cautions Tim against trying to pull a Biff Tannen, listing examples of relatives whose attempts to use their gifts for financial gain only put them on the road to ruin.

It’s a funny, tongue-in-cheek setup that signals we’re not supposed to over-think this whole time travel thing. Of course, things get a little more complicated later on, and the film does break with its own logic at several points, but if you spend any time nitpicking the inconsistencies, you’re missing the point.

Anyway, after several amusing hiccups, Tim finally starts to get the hang of using his power to bail out of awkward situations, which proves to be a huge help in his romantic life. He meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), and through the process of trial and error, he manages to convince her he’s the man of her dreams.

It’s a safe bet that most would consider it a luxury to have a “do-over” option in the courtship process—just look at what it did for Phil Connors! And like Phil, who initially sees his continual returns to the past as a curse, Tim comes to appreciate the ability to hit Ctrl–Z, undo his mistakes, and take advantage of missed opportunities.

Thanks to this superpower, he’s also able to bridge some of the emotional distance between him and his father, who has maintained a caring but somewhat prickly relationship with Tim before bonding with him over their shared gift.

At its heart, About Time is a sweet but not overly sentimental rom-com that’s as much about a guy’s love for his family as his quest to find his soulmate.

—Rob Heidrick

The Counselor should have been great. It’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of Ridley Scott taking the helm of Cormac McCarthy’s first original screenplay, directing a cast stacked with the likes of Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt. It’s one of those films you really expect to enjoy, only to come away wondering how it’s possible for so much talent to be squandered in so little time.

The film is about 10 percent plot and 90 percent overwrought dialogue, giving rise to a scrum of potentially interesting characters who are ultimately given nothing to do. And then there’s Cameron Diaz, whose over-acted turn as a hypersexual cheetah fetishist is yet another sad chapter in her long résumé of poor performances.

Fassbender stars as the nameless Counselor, a criminal defense attorney whose clients are players in the Mexican drug trade. Blinded by his love for his fiancée (Penélope Cruz) and his desire to express that love in the form of a gigantic diamond, the Counselor agrees to act as the middleman in a convoluted scheme that involves shipping $20 million in cocaine from Mexico to Chicago. (The details of the plan are never made explicit, so we’re mostly left to guess about each character’s role in the arrangement.)

Bardem does his best to outshine the material as Reiner, the Counselor’s liaison to the Juarez underbelly and one of many characters who try in vain to warn the hero it’s never a good idea to get in bed with Mexican drug lords, even if it’s just a “one-time deal.” Pitt’s Westray is another slick operator who likes to spice up his criminal dealings with pop-culture references and clever turns of phrase.

Original screenplay notwithstanding, the film feels like an adaptation of one of McCarthy’s novels, and it falls into the same trap that many adaptations have before it: It tries to squeeze the prose for all its worth in fear of wasting a single drop of the artistry that went into crafting it. This comes at the expense of plot momentum and coherent pacing, which quickly devolve into afterthoughts.

Scott chooses to have several key plot developments unfold off screen, opting instead to half-explain them later within lengthy soliloquies. And despite spending so much time talking, the characters are devoid of any kind of background stories that might have added some much-needed contextual flavor to their ramblings.

It would have been easier to identify with the Counselor (or at least understand his intentions) if McCarthy had provided a better taste of the character’s past — a glimpse of some of his shadier clients and the extent to which he’s aware of what they’re capable of. Only then would we really know how much he realized he was putting on the line by inserting himself into that world.

I get what McCarthy was going for. He clearly has a love for his characters and wants us to feel the same affection by watching them engage each other in intimate repartee. We’re supposed to get to know them by sitting in on these improbably witty exchanges in which gangsters name-drop their favorite poets and Mickey Rourke films. (Drug lords — they’re just like us!)

Which is fine, I guess. And there are moments in the film when this actually works, particularly in smaller scenes that allow the characters to flex their personalities (but still don’t really move the plot forward). As usual, Bardem is best suited for that job, most notably in a scene in which he goes into gory detail in relating an anecdote about Diaz’s character getting intimate with a Ferrari. But overall, too much is mired in innuendo, and the viewers are tasked with filling in all the gaps themselves.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not opposed to doing a little bit of work to pull out the subtext. Heavy-handed flashbacks and other lazy shortcuts are poor substitutes for smarter, subtler storytelling. And it’s healthy to ask the audience to use its imagination every now and then.

But throw a guy a bone here. It’s important to keep in mind that film is a visual medium, and there’s a certain threshold where a movie starts to drown in its own dialogue.

In some sense, Ridley Scott has made a career out of toeing that line. He’s the master of slow-burning story arcs that build suspense through a series of quieter moments — Alien, Blade Runner, etc. But what makes those films great is their nuanced but authentic character development — we get to see Ripley and Deckard evolve in meaningful ways as they confront the hostile forces surrounding them. They don’t just talk (and talk and talk) about the cold realities of existence; they take matters into their own hands and fight battles they’re most likely going to lose.

The Counselor — both the character and the film — ultimately fail to do this.

— Rob Heidrick