New York Times' Top 25 of the 21st Century So Far

Ranking the oeuvre of Joel and Ethan Coen is a minor industry on the internet, so it wasn’t surprising that our request for hive-mind assistance in picking the best Coen feature of the 21st century met with a swift and clamorous response. Coen fans are knowledgeable, dogmatic and prone to contrarianism. A surprising number of them stood up for “Intolerable Cruelty” and “Burn After Reading”; “O Brother, Where Art Thou” and “True Grit” had their partisans. Very quickly, though, a three-way race emerged among “No Country for Old Men,” “A Serious Man” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

The academy favored “No Country,” of course – the only one of the Coens’ films to nab a best picture statuette – but much as we admire the dexterity they brought to adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel, we were more moved and intrigued by the metaphysics of “A Serious Man” and the melancholy of “Inside Llewyn Davis.” We vacillated between the two. We asked the Coens themselves to pick a favorite (to no avail). We looked for messages carved into our teeth and encoded in the lyrics of old folk songs.

We went with the drama “Inside Llewyn Davis” because … because of the cat. Because of the sly circularity of the story. Because of the soundtrack. Because of Oscar Isaac’s sad eyes and capable finger-picking. If we misjudged or screwed up, fine. That’s just what people in Coen brothers movies tend to do.