Is it a masterpiece? Not even close.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
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Reviews Counted:14
Fresh:12
Rotten:2
Average Rating:7.8/10
Consensus: Another triumph for the Coen Brothers, No Country has the perfect mixture of suspense, humor, and desperately compelling performances. The seemingly simple story hides a more complex narrative, and high tension is maintained throughout.
Rated: 15 [See Full Rating] for strong graphic violence and some language.
Runtime: 2 hrs 2 mins
Genre: Drugs, Suspense, Thriller, Murder, Theatrical Release, Serial Killers, Money
Theatrical Release:18-01-2008
Synopsis: With NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the Coen Brothers have found a perfect match in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy. Their adaptation of McCarthy's praised novel is a staggering masterpiece.... With NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the Coen Brothers have found a perfect match in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy. Their adaptation of McCarthy's praised novel is a staggering masterpiece. In this almost impossibly faithful adaptation, the film takes place in a small Texas border town in 1980. Sheriff Bell (a never-been-better Tommy Lee Jones) has ruled the land for years without the use of a gun, but a new brand of reckless lawlessness has taken over his town. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is an innocent Everyman with a devoted wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), but when he stumbles across a drug deal gone deadly and finds two million dollars, he's determined to keep it for himself. There's only one problem. He's being pursued by one of the most amoral, evil psychopaths that the big screen has ever seen. Wearing an absurd haircut and brandishing a pressurized weapon that's used to murder cattle, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) creeps forward on his mission to track Moss down and return the money to its rightful owners to save his own skin. As the tension mounts, the body count begins to rise, confirming Sheriff Bell's inability to battle this new wave of modern brutality. The most striking thing about the Coen Brothers' thriller is their masterly use of silence to create an almost unbearable level of tension. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is once again at the top of his game, beautifully capturing this stark and lonely world. The well-rounded cast is clearly excited to be a part of such a stellar production--particularly Bardem, whose Chigurh is a freakishly mysterious monster, and is certain to haunt viewers long after the final credit has rolled. In a career filled with striking achievements, this might very well be the Coen Brothers' finest. It is filmmaking at its best. [More]
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson, Stephen Root
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenwriter: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Producer: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Scott Rudin
Composer: Carter Burwell
Studio: Miramax Films
Reviews for No Country for Old Men
Watching this film has something of the elemental thrill of watching a cloud-shadow spread with miraculous speed over a vast, empty landscape: it has a chilly, portentous intuition of what America is.
With its sly wit, dark intelligence and tense action sequences this film re-establishes the Coens as two of American cinema's most talented directors. It's also the best adaptation of McCarthy's work to date and an unmissable crime movie.
The Coen brothers have once again placed themselves at the very forefront of American cinema.
A masterly tale of the good, the deranged and the doomed that inflects the raw violence of the west with a wry acknowledgement of the demise of codes of honour, this is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative.
Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.
In a sense, the film is a lament for old certainties which are cruelly swept aside, perhaps purged would be more accurate, by Bardem’s extraordinary monster.
The Coens are wintry and dead calm ironists, and their movie is finally less an assault on our sensibilities than a subtle -- and possibly permanent -- insinuation into our consciousnesses.
An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could.
No Country for Old Men is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made Fargo.
For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- No Country for Old Men is pure heaven.
No Country delivers, with suspense scenes as taut as they are acutely observed.
The Coens' typically superior filmmaking sustains the electrifying mood for most of the picture, but they are undone by being too faithful to the source novel by Cormac McCarthy.
A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor.
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