Movie review by Greg Carlson

It doesn’t take long to realize that the quiet, introspective Chris “Wonder” Schoeck lives with a fire inside. In his early 40s, the native of Queens, New York is the subject of director Dave Carroll and producer/co-writer/cinematographer Ryan Scafuro’s “Bending Steel,” a biographical portrait of Schoeck during his quest to join the ranks of the “oldetime” strongmen who once astonished crowds at the sideshows of Coney Island. Articulate, thoughtful, and unfailingly polite, the physically slight Schoeck looks and sounds nothing like the stereotypical bar-bender. One of the first things that comes to nearly any viewer’s mind is an acute sense of the seemingly Sisyphean odds against Schoeck and his ability to find gainful employment doing something that presumably faded from popularity decades ago.

Carroll practically stumbled on Schoeck’s story when he realized his apartment building neighbor was tearing phone books and twisting horseshoes in the storage area cages near a basement laundry room. Carroll soon introduced himself and pitched the documentary. Schoeck mostly keeps his own company, with the small circle of fellow strongmen as the notable exception. Running parallel to Schoeck’s deeply personal story is the movie’s discovery of a unique subculture of devotees committed to unusual displays of human toughness. Schoeck is trained by Chris “Haircules” Rider, who uses his lengthy locks to break #8 jack-chains as part of his stage act, and the contrast between the two men is immediate and striking.

One of the film’s most welcome components is the acknowledgment of the colorful history and practice of oldetime strongmen, and “Bending Steel” treats figures like the iconic, chain-chomping, vaudeville-era Joseph “The Mighty Atom” Greenstein and Greenstein’s student Slim “The Hammer Man” Farman with the same reverence and curiosity demonstrated by Schoeck. In his late 70s, Farman performs his signature “hammer lever” feat on camera, and Carroll and Scafuro trace the tradition of one-on-one mentorship in the strongman community all the way from Greenstein to Schoeck.

While “Bending Steel” contains many scenes in which Schoeck’s passion appears to far outstrip his ability as a performer – in terms of both showmanship and muscle power – Carroll never mocks or ridicules the man, even though it may have been easy to do so. In one painful scene, Schoeck’s banter with the audience at an open mic opportunity fails miserably, and time and again Schoeck is encouraged by his fellow strongmen to develop some kind of interactive rapport with the people watching him. Schoeck’s own parents, confused by their son’s dreams, display cruel indifference to this desire in their child that they have no capacity to understand.

Schoeck’s inanimate opponent, a kind of forged bête noire, is a flat steel bar two inches wide and three eighths of an inch thick. The cold gray metal functions at least on one level as the film’s Macguffin, taunting Schoeck with its promise of either ruination or glory. That bar, which Schoeck hangs on his wall as a constant reminder of his mission, comes to represent much more than a person’s demonstrable tenacity, courage, and grit, and the filmmakers know it. “Bending Steel” builds to a performance during which Schoeck will make his first public attempt at the bar, and that moment, with its uncertain outcome, unfolds with excruciating drama and anticipation.

“Bending Steel” will open the 14^th Fargo Film Festival on Tuesday, March 4 at the Historic Fargo Theatre. Subject and star Chris “Wonder” Schoeck will talk about his experiences making the movie and take questions from the audience following the screening.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In “Hell on Earth: The Desecration & Resurrection of ‘The Devils’,” Father Gene Phillips S.J., a priest who consulted with the Legion of Decency, relates an anecdote on the looming censorship problems facing Ken Russell’s film and the fate of the movie’s notorious “Rape of Christ” sequence. Surprisingly, Phillips concludes, “The scene portrays blasphemy, it is not a blasphemous scene.” A similar dialogue has engulfed discussion on Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a movie that, according to Pamela McClintock of “The Hollywood Reporter,” initially faced an NC-17 rating from the MPAA until Scorsese agreed to snip some of the film’s most explicit imagery.

Some of the deeply divided arguments mounted against “The Wolf of Wall Street” make the same kinds of claims that were leveled at “The Devils.” In “The New Yorker,” David Denby concludes his excoriation by writing that the movie is “meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking.” At the other end of the spectrum, Sara Benincasa, writing for “Jezebel,” argues, “But here is a fun thing that is true: depiction of bad behavior does not constitute endorsement of said bad behavior.” [italics hers]. Can Scorsese have his cake and eat it as well?

Almost expectedly, both Denby and Benincasa – and many other critics – invoke excess as a descriptive measure of the both the film’s content and Scorsese’s approach to staging that content. The “excess” invocation is so common, it can be sometimes easy to overlook the possibility that the very material identified as excessive is, cinematically speaking, integral, intrinsic, and constitutional not only to films like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but to all narrative features. Linda Williams has said it as well as anybody: “For if, it seems, sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational effects of these three types of films [pornography, horror, and melodrama], the designation ‘gratuitous’ is itself gratuitous.”

As a plot, then, wretched excess and its attractive visual celebration is a both/and not an either/or proposition, allowing for a different kind of discussion to emerge in the examination of Jordan Belfort’s avaricious, rapacious appetite for consumption. Like “Unforgiven,” a movie that ruminates on the destructive, soul-eating futility of violence while building to a climax that depends on the thrilling spectacle of unleashed gunplay, “The Wolf of Wall Street” outmatches and outthinks Oliver Stone’s relentlessly quoted “Wall Street,” a title often cited for its own slippery status as part cautionary tale, part unscrupulous instruction manual.

Even with its almost three-hour running time, “The Wolf of Wall Street” could use a little more of Kyle Chandler’s smart FBI agent and additional insight into the impulses and inclinations of Margot Robbie’s Naomi. Scorsese, so identified with the close examinations of hypermasculine protagonists, has rarely been described as a filmmaker fully invested in the inner lives of the female characters populating his movies. Even so, the filmmaker has directed ten women to Oscar nominations. Two, Ellen Burstyn in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and Cate Blanchett in “The Aviator,” won. Had a small amount of attention been diverted from Leonardo DiCaprio’s Belfort to Robbie’s Naomi, Scorsese’s nomination record might have been further extended.

Several weeks following its debut, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” like so many of Scorsese’s best films, has an almost insidious way of staying in your head, maybe even making you feel a little sick to your stomach. Both Benincasa and Denby’s colleague Richard Brody put their fingers right on it: Scorsese, now 71 and one of the grand masters of the game, may very well be criticizing the aspirational fervor of American capitalism’s selfishness and ego by reminding the viewer that he or she would, given the chance, do largely as louche parvenu Jordan does.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Jehane Noujaim’s vivid recontextualization of the 2011 demonstrations that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt forms the basis and the beginning of Academy Award nominee “The Square.” Through the eyes of those who participated in the protests that came to be known as part of the Arab Spring, Noujaim’s documentary blends the abstract and the specific, mainly by following the highly charged trajectories of a trio of young men involved deeply, personally, and spiritually in the drama. Unfolding with intense urgency, “The Square” applies both street-level and balcony-height views of the often chaotic, always stirring interactions occurring in and around Tahrir Square.

“The Square” introduces us to Ahmed Hassan, whose optimism and enthusiasm will be tested once violence enters the equation. Khalid Abdalla, the Scotland-born actor familiar to American moviegoers in “United 93,” “The Kite Runner,” and “Green Zone,” is a fellow secularist as well as a founding member of the Mosireen Collective, dedicated to citizen-originated journalism. Magdy Ashour is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood torn between the organization, his family, and the skeptical friends who oppose the Brotherhood’s deals with the powerful Egyptian military leadership. Ashour’s presence drives one of the film’s key questions: how might democracy function in a culture where church and state are so inextricably linked?

A fourth man, Ramy Essam, identified as the singing voice of the revolution through his folky, charismatic performances, appears often, but for whatever reason, is not afforded the same kind of screen time given to Hassan, Abdalla, and Ashour. Essam does, however, play an important role in the military crackdown on the popular uprising when his gruesome wounds are recorded as one of many examples bearing witness to beating and torture at the hands of police and thugs hired to break up the ongoing demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

Noujaim builds her very compelling document on the strength of this principal group of men, but considering the status of rights for women under the shifting political scenarios that continue to emerge following the end of rule by Mubarak and then Morsi, the presence of strong female voices in “The Square” is lacking. Aida El Kashef, an articulate associate of the protesters whose personal stories are more deeply investigated, shows up a handful of times, and a small number of other women refer to the difficulties faced by female demonstrators.

“The Square” does not shy away from the horrifying images that confirmed the actions of the state during the ongoing period of “emergency rule.” Military vehicles and tanks run down and crush to death several citizens. People are beaten, gassed and shot. Noujaim thoroughly understands the role of citizen journalists in the age of social media, especially the compelling way uploaded cell phone video can speak truth to power. One truism of history is the willingness of those in control to deny the actions undertaken on behalf of a regime. Like “Control Room,” her fascinating documentary examining Al Jazeera, Noujaim marvels at the doublespeak spewed by those paid essentially to spin the truth. Army spokesperson General Hamdy Bekheit, confronted with a picture of a gunshot victim, replies “This is not an army bullet. It doesn’t look like one.” Based on all available evidence, Bekheit’s words defy credulity.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David O. Russell continues to expand his interest in a kind of contemporary screwball comedy with “American Hustle,” a tremendously funny con that manages to simultaneously conjure “The Philadelphia Story” and “The Sting” by way of “Goodfellas.” As messy, ridiculous, and elaborate as the wild comb-over worn by Christian Bale’s scammer Irving Rosenfeld, “American Hustle” builds its roller coaster on the outlines of the FBI’s cockeyed Abscam scandal, a bizarre sting operation that mushroomed from the investigation of forgery and stolen art to the bribery and entrapment of public officials. The late 70s setting serves as a tip regarding Russell’s intentions, as actors slip into period costumes and hairstyles matched perfectly to the delirious soundtrack.

The “Some of this actually happened” title card that opens the movie works as both Russell’s winking, “don’t take this seriously” come-on to the viewer and the cautionary reminder that some folks really did wear towering pompadours like the one sprayed into place on the head of Camden, New Jersey mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner). Polito’s mob-connected big wheel finds a kindred spirit in Irving. Both men have developed a drive and appetite for social connections and have convinced themselves that they only hustle, cheat, and swindle for benevolent and bighearted ends. Incredibly, their pathetic self-delusion somehow borders on the sympathetic.

With the recent announcement of the Academy Award honorees, Russell’s movie is the fifteenth in Oscar history to receive nominations in all four acting categories (none ever won all four), but more impressive is this: Russell is the only director to do it twice, let alone back to back. The principal quartet of Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence receives ample support from Renner, Louis CK, Shea Whigham, Elisabeth Rohm, Paul Herman, and an uncredited Robert De Niro, who steals a wonderful scene as a gangster with an unexpected talent for languages. Russell makes it clear that when the actors have fun, the audience will as well.

A few critics have observed that America’s Current Sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence might be too young to play Rosenfeld’s wife Rosalyn, but the effortlessly appealing star is a riot, using her character’s status as an unsatisfied, manipulative odalisque to catalyze action from “science oven” kitchen fires to loose-lipped betrayal. Cleaning house in every sense of the phrase, Lawrence is as dynamite gyrating to “Live and Let Die” as she is fearlessly looking for a good time with dangerous thugs while Irving and his girlfriend Sydney (Adams) look on in horror.

Even though the balding and paunchy Irving at first seems an unlikely Romeo, he assumes a place at the center of the movie’s pair of triangles. Married to Rosalyn but romancing kindred spirit Sydney Prosser, a gifted imposter who morphs into faux English noblewoman Lady Edith to dazzle suckers, Irving must play ball with impulsive, showboating G-man Richie DiMaso (Cooper) or face charges. Quickly, Russell starts shuffling the deck, leaving viewers to wonder just who’s zooming who as Lady Edith appears to entertain the affections of Richie. In one of the movie’s most stimulating scenes, Sydney and Richie move from the dance floor to a bathroom stall at a disco club. Choreographed to the one-two punch of Donna Summer and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Sydney insists she doesn’t want anymore “fake shit,” but by that point, reality and fantasy are utterly indistinguishable from one another.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Cutie and the Boxer,” filmmaker Zachary Heinzerling’s portrait of married artists Noriko and Ushio Shinohara, largely refrains from passing judgment on the quality of the work produced by the two New York City residents. Instead, the documentarian takes advantage of his proximity and access to navigate a messy, psychologically complex relationship fraught with the full range of emotions associated with so many long-term partnerships. The backstory, filled in with efficiency and economy, begins in 1972, when the wide-eyed, teenage Noriko arrived in America from Japan and fell for the passionate and more established Ushio, a man more than two decades her senior.

Noriko’s own artistic ambitions were quickly sidelined by Ushio’s alcoholism and the birth of son Alex. The young woman traded her brushes for a seemingly thankless role as Ushio’s assistant, servant, maid, cook, and caregiver. But Heinzerling knows that Noriko is the glue that holds the dysfunctional team together, and invites the viewer to experience much of the unfolding narrative through the eyes of this remarkable, indefatigable woman. Now, forty years into their partnership, Noriko’s art begins to attract attention and Ushio’s jealousy bubbles to the surface. Heinzerling sorts out and makes clear the complicated, love-hate interconnectedness that inextricably links Ushio to Noriko.

At least five years in the making, Heinzerling’s movie covers the familiar tale of an against-the-odds struggle to pursue one’s avocation in the face of sobering financial challenges. Outside of the art world, and arguably within it, self-described Neo-Dadaist Ushio Shinohara is not widely recognized and for many decades has toiled on the fringes and in the shadows of other contemporaries who have managed to find more financial success and critical adulation. Shinohara’s signatures as documented by Heinzerling focus on two overarching motifs: massive, abstract, action paintings resulting from the splatter of Ushio’s boxing gloves and a series of motorcycle sculptures crafted out of discarded and found objects.

Heinzerling incorporates some beautiful vintage film footage of the Shinohara family that brings a dimension of intimate time-travel to the movie. The director also adds animation of Noriko’s autobiographical “Cutie and Bullie” illustrations, alluring, inky panels in which pigtail-braided and frequently naked alter ego Cutie gets the better of the insensitive, domineering Bullie. Cutie’s story, accompanied by short phrases often rendered in Noriko’s fractured English, opens a window into Noriko’s psyche that captures her sadness and anger along with an empathetic, clear-eyed tolerance of her husband. One caption reads, “Cutie understood how much Bullie wanted to be loved.”

The pastel-hued, slow motion fisticuffs, underscored by Yasuaki Shimizu & Saxophonette’s version of Bach’s Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1, that play over the end credits of “Cutie and the Boxer” shape the perfect metaphor symbolizing Noriko and Ushio’s partnership, a bittersweet pairing resistant to the notion of happily ever after. In an interview with Emma Carmichael, Noriko says, “I don’t believe in the happy ending. You know, everybody wants to, say, at the end of their life, to maybe die satisfied, die quietly, or die comfortably – surrounded by many friends or family. But my hero is Caravaggio, and he died young, struggling, but continuing with his art. So I want to die with my brush in my hand, and to die with art.” After seeing “Cutie and the Boxer,” it is difficult to imagine Noriko Shinohara doing anything but that.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Since his 1999 feature debut “Being John Malkovich,” Spike Jonze has established himself as one of the most gifted and intelligent visual stylists working in the cinematic medium. Jonze’s latest, “Her,” is only the director’s fourth feature and is the first full-length original screenplay credited solely to the auteur. An ambitious science fiction that contemplates artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, “Her” is another child of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the unforgettable HAL 9000. The core concept is elegant and simple: lonely, soon to be divorced protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), whose expressive face dominates the frame, falls in love with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), a self-aware operating system.

As emotionally isolated Theodore, a writer who composes personal missives for a company called Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, establishes an affectionate partnership with the disembodied Samantha, he also interacts with several human women, including close friend Amy (Amy Adams), a blind date played by Olivia Wilde, and wife Catherine (Rooney Mara), who is often seen in flashback. Those who speculated that Jonze was the inspiration for Giovanni Ribisi’s John in ex-wife Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” will wonder whether the director has returned the favor, even though extratextual biographical conjecture is unnecessary to one’s enjoyment of the film.

Edmund Lee’s idea about the value of surrounding yourself with the “dreamers and the doers” etc., is a lesson well-minded by Jonze. Many team members, including cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, bring remarkable craft to bear, but it is K. K. Barrett, production designer on all of Jonze’s features, who emerges as perhaps the most significant hero of “Her.” Barrett’s eye for detail in the creation of future L.A. infuses every frame of the movie, offering an uncanny vision of things to come via the retrofitting and retro-futurism concepts explored in the early 1980s by Ridley Scott, Syd Mead, Lawrence Paull, and Lloyd Dunn, among others. The gorgeous rosy red and pink color schemes, the seamless blending of Los Angeles and Shanghai, and the warm touches of smartphones that look more like vintage cigarette cases are just a few of the film’s ocular pleasures.

One of the movie’s best running gags is that the earpiece-connected pedestrians never talk to the other humans passing by. Rich with the possibilities of near endless readings, “Her” has been tagged out of the gate for its commentary on intimacy and interconnectedness in the age of evolving competition from electronic screens, but it is the juxtaposition of the film’s intriguing femininity and the establishment of straight male fantasies through the reification of Samantha that deserves closer inspection. As Manohla Dargis pointed out, Samantha “doesn’t complain about juggling her many roles as [Theodore’s] assistant, comfort, turn-on, helpmate and savior,” which leads one to wonder how the story might have been different had Jonze switched the genders of the leads.

Jonze plays the romance almost entirely straight, so that by the time Samantha’s evolving consciousness leads her to disclose several disturbing revelations to Theodore, “Her” begins to flirt with the Frankensteinian “turning on the creator” construct that has fueled everything from the homicidal deviousness of HAL to the dystopian horrors of Skynet, and given Jonze’s penchant for offbeat bricolage, even “Electric Dreams” and “Weird Science.” The relaxed running time of the theatrical cut allows for a late, minor stretch of repetitious droop, and I for one would love to see the 90 minute Steven Soderbergh version described in Mark Harris’s tremendous, must-read “Vulture” feature on “Her.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An exuberant and emotionally involving portrait of rock star Kathleen Hanna sure to please longtime fans while making plenty of new ones, Sini Anderson’s “The Punk Singer” joins a crowded slate of terrific music-oriented documentaries released in 2013. The filmmaker’s friendship with the outspoken leader of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and, more recently, the Julie Ruin allows for unprecedented access to Hanna and her circle of colleagues and collaborators, resulting in a kind of mid-career retrospective that makes a compelling argument for Hanna’s future induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – or if that institution isn’t cool enough, perhaps a Punk Rock Hall of Fame.

Hanna’s energy is apparent from her first spoken word performances, and Anderson includes a clip from a 1991 Wordcore event in Olympia that will stop you in your tracks. Swinging her arms and rocking back and forth while she stamps her shoes in rhythm, Hanna says, “I am your worst nightmare come to life. I’m a girl who you can’t shut up. There’s not a guy big enough can handle this mouth. I’m going to tell everyone what you did to me. It was the middle of the night in my house. It was the middle of the night in my house. It was the middle of the night in my house…” It’s the perfect introduction to Kathleen Hanna’s unmistakable self-expression.

For those lucky enough to have witnessed Bikini Kill in their prime, “The Punk Singer” inspires plenty of nostalgia and reflection. The particular way that Hanna used her voice to articulate feminist ideals with a blunt clarity that cut through so much noise is displayed in both the vintage footage and the recent interviews. Many devotees will want to hurry back to Lucy Thane’s indispensable tour doc “It Changed My Life: Bikini Kill in the U.K.,” a valuable companion piece to Anderson’s film. The filmmaker also includes a bit of Hanna’s red ski mask interview from Tamra Davis’s “No Alternative Girls,” the short that brought riot grrrl to the attention of many suburban Midwesterners after guest-host Thurston Moore programmed it on an episode of “120 Minutes.”

Fueled by archival footage of Hanna performing solo and as a frontwoman, “The Punk Singer” is an essential record of one crucial facet of the riot grrrl movement. Anderson arranges the content of “The Punk Singer” principally in chronological order, although a tease in which interview subjects wonder aloud why Hanna just seemed to drop off the radar in 2005 sets up the revelation of Hanna’s ongoing struggle with Lyme disease, an affliction that temporarily derailed her recording and performing career.

All the historical bullet points are touched, including the DIY philosophy, the title origin of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the “girls to the front” ethos of Bikini Kill shows, the distribution of fanzines, the “Bull in the Heather” cameo, the assault by Courtney Love, and the unlikely courtship of Adam Horovitz, but the scenes directly addressing Hanna’s debilitating illness are among the film’s most memorable, particularly because her admirers can hardly imagine seeing that kind of vulnerability revealed by their fierce heroine and champion.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, working with co-directors Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian who, like so many other of the unnamed collaborators listed in the credits, elected to withhold identity out of personal fear, labored for half a decade on the brutal and brilliant “The Act of Killing.” A singular non-fiction that Oppenheimer has described as a “documentary of the imagination,” the movie addresses the mid-1960s genocide of an alleged million victims, including communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia, through the eyes of the death squad executioners who carried out the murders firsthand.

Applying the controversial conceit of working with the killers to reconstruct their atrocities as re-imagined movie scenes done in candy-colored genre styles including musicals, Westerns, and gangster pictures, Oppenheimer arrives at a surreal crossroads of truth and memory. In a terrific interview with Pamela Cohn, the filmmaker defended the unorthodox approach, saying “[The] thought was to look not only at the characters, but the whole regime, through a prism where we see the stories and are also able to create the second- and third-hand stories in which they imagine themselves – and fail to know themselves.”

While the film introduces a ghoulish gallery of seemingly soulless thugs, a grandfather named Anwar Congo soon emerges as the movie’s central character. Attended to by the flamboyant, younger, paramilitary-affiliated Herman Koto, Congo surprises the viewer via his weird identification with the people he put to death nearly fifty years ago, even electing to appear as the condemned in some of the movie-in-the-movie productions. In scene after astonishing scene, Congo discusses his methods and techniques in the very places where he took away lives, at one point demonstrating the effectiveness of asphyxiation by garrote and its superiority to beheading.

A number of critics have complained that “The Act of Killing” fails by omitting or ignoring the deceased in favor of their assassins (Oppenheimer is working on another film that follows family members of a victim), but I think the casualties reside in each and every frame, from the heartbreaking anecdote told by a man whose stepfather was dragged from bed in the middle of the night to Congo’s final interaction with Oppenheimer. As the story unfolds, the viewer can begin to experience a sense of profound intellectual and emotional dysphoria, wondering when, or even if, Congo will recognize the magnitude of his transgressions. Oppenheimer’s visual answer does not disappoint, and the hallucinatory conclusion of “The Act of Killing” results in cinema’s most accomplished ending of 2013.

What then should we make of our brief, and hopefully only, acquaintance with Anwar Congo? At the risk of sounding like one of those “shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated” described by Ron Rosenbaum in his 2009 essay on Hannah Arendt’s famous construction “the banality of evil,” I could not help but be astonished by the layers of Anwar’s psychic armor and the depths of his denial. Rosenbaum, citing scholar Bernard Wasserstein, mentions Arendt’s original concept of “radical evil” and the irreconcilable contradiction between “radical” and “banal” as descriptors. In “The Act of Killing,” Oppenheimer gets as close as anyone to bringing those poles into proximity.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Inside Llewyn Davis” echoes several pet concerns previously explored by Joel and Ethan Coen in their impressive body of work. Exquisite period detail evocative of a romanticized past, the struggle for some degree of personal integrity in a marketplace geared toward the lowest common denominator, and a trippy Homeric odyssey infused with highly specific musical annotations are a trio of the new movie’s thematic interests that could be applied to “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink,” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” respectively. Oscar Isaac’s title character, the stubborn and unlucky singer modeled in part on Dave Van Ronk, is, like the Coens’ Tom Reagan and Larry Gopnik, a man out of time and a man out of time.

And just like the double meaning in that repetition, “Inside Llewyn Davis” is bookended by scenes depicting a night very much like September 29, 1961, when Robert Shelton listened to Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City and sent the young singer on his way in a legendary “New York Times” write-up (“All the ‘husk and bark’ are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs”). Those impossibilities of fate lead us to wonder how many thousands of other voices just missed the opportunity to be discovered and embraced by the masses, but very probably, the Coens are suggesting that unlike Dylan, Llewyn is merely good. But not great. And not a genius.

Writing for “Tablet,” J. Hoberman reiterated his contempt for the Coens in a scathing essay arguing that for the filmmakers, “a robust disdain for their creatures is a given,” but I think the great critic is not entirely on the mark. Llewyn Davis is the sort of character cinephiles dream about: a thoroughly complex human being capable of earning, by turns, both the sympathy and the scorn of the viewer. Carey Mulligan’s Jean heaps the latter on Llewyn in a colorful, profanity-laced tirade attesting to her ex-lover’s fecklessness and irresponsibility. She’s right. But the filmmakers surely admire and relate to their protagonist’s restlessness, artistic curiosity, and talent.

The Coens have often demonstrated a keen ear for recorded music, and with the sterling skills of frequent collaborator T Bone Burnett, “Inside Llewyn Davis” boasts a beautiful set of songs. Burnett worked with Marcus Mumford on a couple tracks, and Mumford’s duet with Isaac on “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” emerges as one of the movie’s most resonant motifs. Mumford voices Llewyn’s deceased partner Mike Timlin, a man very much present in his absence. The film is filled with memorable musical performances, ranging from a Columbia session for a novelty titled “Please Mr. Kennedy” to Llewyn singing “The Shoals of Herring” to his fading, silent, retired merchant marine father in what may be the movie’s purest, saddest scene.

Being beaten in an alley isn’t likely the first meaning of the aphorism “failure is the greatest teacher” that springs to mind, but at the beginning and again at the end of the journey, we see that Llewyn Davis is his own worst enemy. An orange and protean tabby named Ulysses comes to symbolize the very inscrutability of Llewyn’s against-all-odds commitment to the pursuit of fortune as a folksinger. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is filled with the great lines only the Coens write – many of them spoken by John Goodman – but one of the toughest and most nuanced belongs to F. Murray Abraham as Gate of Horn kingmaker Bud Grossman. After listening to Llewyn’s striking rendition of “The Death of Queen Jane,” he says, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” How can you respond to a pronouncement like that?

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The monochromatic landscapes of Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” capture the open fields of America during a quixotic father-son road trip in which nothing and everything happens all at once. Bob Nelson’s screenplay introduces Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) shambling along the side of the road in Billings, Montana. Armed with a sweepstakes letter and convinced he is to be the recipient of a million dollars, Woody either can’t or won’t accept the reality that there is no cash waiting for him in Lincoln. Soft-hearted son David (Will Forte), whose own life as a recently dumped stereo salesman is as static as his father’s, agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska even though David recognizes the prize offer as bogus.

Once Woody and David arrive in Hawthorne, the small town where Woody grew up and where many of his old acquaintances, flames, and relatives still reside, word gets out about the million dollar windfall. At this point, Payne shifts a great deal of attention to the avarice of Woody’s extended family, many quick to claim that Woody owes them money. David especially dislikes Woody’s old partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), an unctuous bully who wants Woody to “make things right.” With echoes of stories like Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “Nebraska” brings out the worst human nature. One wonders why, despite David’s protests, seemingly everyone in Hawthorne refuses to accept that Woody is no millionaire.

Like “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Nebraska” was also prepared in a color version to meet contractual requirements for particular international outlets, but articles posted by “Yahoo! News Canada” and “Variety” describe Payne’s longtime desire to make a black and white movie along with his hope that “no one ever sees” the color version of the film. The black and white is a perfect choice, and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael’s anamorphic widescreen images turn the establishing shots of broad, traffic-free main streets and proud old farmsteads into additional characters.

Walking the tightrope between serious and silly inevitably strains consistency in tone, and where Woody’s foggy reticence is often played for unspoken longing and regret (during, for example, the tour of his now-abandoned boyhood house), wife Kate (June Squibb) is a fountain of unfiltered and occasionally foul gossip about all manner of vice among her friends and neighbors. Squibb is very funny, even if her dialogue is not as entirely believable as the group of old men watching football and chatting about the makes of cars they used to own.

In many of Payne’s sharp-eyed films, from “Citizen Ruth” to “Election,” the filmmaker has skewered misguided power grabs and the sort of small stakes self-importance that makes for easily bruised thin skin. “Nebraska” offers up provincial yokels that run the gamut from big-hearted to greedy-eyed, and open for some debate is the extent to which Payne sympathizes with the folks who populate Hawthorne. At the center of it all is Woody, quite possibly exhibiting the early signs of dementia. Not everyone will accept or appreciate Woody’s uncommunicative, blank slate status (reliably performed by a tremendous Dern), but Payne delivers an earnest payoff that allows the old man to briefly transcend the simultaneous presence/absence of his impenetrable and unknowable character.