It's their best work in a while and it's probably going to end up being the year's best movie.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:221
Fresh:208
Rotten:13
Average Rating:8.5/10
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
This measured yet excitingly tense, violent yet maturely sorrowful thriller marks the first time the filmmakers have faithfully adapted somebody else's work to their own specifications and considerable strengths.
The ending is so lame it made me feverish. Then I remembered the perfection that came before it, and concluded that this is, without question, the best movie ever made by the eccentric Coen brothers.
This is the Coen Brothers' leanest and least affected film since Blood Simple.
Bleak but beautiful, and with characteristic Coen shafts of gallows humor,...about as perfect as a film can get...a shocking and mesmerizing experience.
The Coens know how a thing or two about pacing, and it's relentless here. The story is full of unexpected twists and switchbacks, and opportunities for the audience to gear down and take a breath are few and far between.
This film is an evil delight; adapted from Cormack McCarthy’s book, it’s filled with suspense, pitch-black humor and one of the most memorable villains in recent cinema.
While No Country For Old Men is compelling from beginning to end, the film lacks soul.
A return to glory for the Coen Brothers, a revisiting of the formula that worked so well for them in Fargo, but with a darker, more cynical twist.
If I want wry lawmen and smart, calculating fugitives, I’ll get them from Elmore Leonard; and, if I want Leonard, I’ll take him neat, rather than slow-filtered, drop by drop, through a layer of Faulkner, then laced with the Book of Jeremiah.
The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making.
Like The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction and other films that shift paradigms in mid-stream, there's more happening than meets the eye....Stark and spare, it's often a gasp-inducing, armrest-clutching experience.
Audience members who found previous Coen brothers' works too precious can rejoice in this, their best film--close to an American masterwork.
A dust-bowl Pulp Fiction, the movie is bloody, suspenseful, unnerving and, not incidentally, hilarious. The best Coen Bros. drama, without the twitchy mannerisms of Fargo.
A Cormac McCarthy horror-mystery with all its ingenuity and without Hollywood compromise. Happily for literature, the movie retains the fright and power of the novel with its shock ending.
I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn’t.
The Coens' first film since their leaden remake of The Ladykillers is an exceptional return to their Blood Simple roots, offering up a crime saga in which money is almost as irresistible as bad choices are inevitable.
Against the whisper of wind and buzz of flies, the Coens manage to find tension in the subtlest of movements and cut the dialogue through with humour as arid as the landscape.
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