No Country for Old Men is a modern American masterpiece, a film of unbridled power and purpose.
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
I treasure movies such as this - movies that put you in a location, allow you to soak up the details, and constantly take you places you don't anticipate going. No Country For Old Men is a masterpiece.
Joel and Ethan Coen have a great catalog of films behind them, but they paint their masterpiece with No Country For Old Men.
Imagine, if you will, that you are on an amazing vacation. One for the ages. Then, on the last day - you are mugged. No matter what transpired before, the trip is tainted.
Not since Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) can I remember a film in which dead silence is used more exquisitely and more frequently to produce nearly unbearable tension.
It's the kind of movie that cries out for a second look, because it's easy to admire, hard to actually like and harder still to penetrate
A brutal and violent film that breaks some of the rules that we expect from crime thrillers. NO COUNTRY is gripping, but it goes for the gut instead of the head.
Javier Bardem steals the show as perhaps the most unnerving screen villain of the year, a monster who ups the ante in terms of tension by holding a cattle gun to his victims' heads while flipping a coin to determine who lives and who dies.
May be the most faithful screen adaptation of a novel since John Huston directed 'The Maltese Falcon' in 1941...
a nail-biting masterpiece of suspense, operating on a philosophical level that is as sophisticated as it is compelling
Javier Bardem's sadistic fiend has got to be the most ghoulish homicidal maniac around since Jack The Ripper.
It proves [the Coens] can hold an audience in thrall with the simplest of cinema's elements: a memorable image.
...a thoughtful, mature and earnestly meant work about the essential problem of being human-- the suspicion that this is all there is, and that all our noble ideas about honor and decency, about right and wrong, matter not at all to darkening sky and
The film is a slow burn, not building, not petering out, just becoming gradually more nerve-wracking as each plot point makes itself known. Astounding sound design by Craig Berkey.
No Country for Old Men isn't the first great movie certain to have its ending criticized even by many who enjoyed the rest of the picture.
And boy howdy, does that dialogue howl like a basset hound pup who's just been yanked from his momma.
With No Country for Old Men, the brothers Coen return to Texas -- and to form.
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