For a long time, the Coen Brothers were renowned for their ironic, meta-inclined, tongue in cheek pictures - it seemed impossible for the pair to make anything that didn't feel like they were laughing at their characters from behind the camera. And if you failed to realise that, the entire movie probably proved hard to digest. As of late, however, there's been a new wave of less ironic Coen flicks, a phase which arguably started with No Country For Old Men, was more apparent in their remake of True Grit, and even more so in this year's Inside Llewyn Davis. That's not to say that Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't feel like a Coen Brothers movie - the trademark dialogue and bizarro world characters haven't disappeared entirely. But this movie, which hones in on the '60s folk scene on a character trying to make it as big as Bob Dylan and failing at every turn, is a sincere one, not without laughs (you might still define it as a comedy, depending on how you take to it), but made affecting by its lead character (Oscar Issac), who struggles to find his place over its musically-focused runtime. It might well be the Coens most affecting picture yet.
