Not your granddad's type of Western.

Rating: 10/10 (20 September 2016)

No Country for Old Men is probably the only neo-Western on film to be successful as a feature. The Coen Brothers love their mystery, where the story doesn't seem to have a clear end in sight for the protagonists, and this movie is like a post-modern Western that builds upon the aesthetic foundations of John Ford's westerns like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, except No Country for Old Men is set in 1980 and the update is terrifyingly fitting for the story. Not much has changed, and the Texas setting shows that the morale of the Old West has been preserved by men like the ruthless Anton Chigurh.
The Coen Brothers create a world they explore fully regardless of the genre; The Big Lebowski used stoner comedy tropes in the midst of a neo-noir comedy setting, Burn After Reading was a black comedy showing regular (and ignorant) people blackmailing exposure of CIA-operatives, and No Country for Old Men is a Western that has the same atmosphere as the genre-classics except it's a generational update with the same morality of the Old West.
It's an entertaining and, at times, uncomfortable story exploring greed, and how the changing of the times shows the sad difference of ideologies between the old and the young, hence the title.