An unsettling thriller and a statement of great concern for the future.

Rating: 9/10 (4 July 2010)

It's the most measured, classical film of the Coen brothers' 23-year career, and maybe the best. In 1980, near the Rio Grande in Texas, a hunter (Josh Brolin) stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong: dead bodies, and a briefcase full of cash, which he takes. He is then hunted down by a sociopath (Javier Bardem), hired to retrieve the money, while a veteran sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) investigates the crime scene.
No Country For Old Men is a pitch-perfect piece of film-making, all at one with its complex, dark subject matter: a nightmarish scenario of unfettered, unstoppable evil descending on a dry, desolate land, sweeping aside notions of decency as old-fashioned and irrelevant. As is often the case, the Coens twist and bend genre rules to their own ends, and the story crackles with dry humour and surprises: one character meets his end off screen in what, in other hands, would seem anti-climactic. Jones is the voice of decency here, a weary man nearing retirement age and fearful of an impending doom in which evil would become routine. He has good cause: as the relentless Chuigurh, Bardem is utterly terrifying. This is a remarkably assured work, stunningly photographed, with music that sounds like a light wind across an arid landscape. The Coens have never been better.