Entertaining, Deep on many levels

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2016)

Let me start by saying, there are several movies critics eat up, that they shouldn't. This was not one of those. This was near-perfection.
What it seems like is a fairly basic plot: A hunter named Moss finds a suitcase full of dirty money and a psychotic killer is after him to get it back. You have one of the best movie villains ever put to screen played perfectly by Javier Bardem. You have a like-able main character, who the viewer roots for. Then about two thirds of the way through the movie, something happens that most viewers don't like/ understand: The scene cuts and Moss is just dead. Nothing is shown of how Chigurh got him. He's just dead.
To understand the reasoning for this you have to look back to the very first scene. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is narrating and says that getting up there in age, he just doesn't want to see something "that he's never seen before". Thus, the cat and mouse game between Moss and Chigurh is just a narrative of something that Bell, in fact, has never seen. Moss dying off screen is supposed to show the viewer that the real protagonist of the story is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and as the movie ends Sheriff Bell is shown telling his dream to his wife, almost signifying that he is ready to move on, and has accepted his place in the world, and that the world of drugs, violence and crime is indeed "no country" for an old man.
Taking this movie strictly on a literal basis, you may struggle to enjoy it fully. But when you fully understand the symbolism and underlying ideas, you can't help but love this classic.