What makes the movie a masterpiece, however, is not the Coens' supreme command of their craft in these scenes, but their willingness to embrace the resigned worldview of McCarthy's novel.
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, Serial Killers, Money, Theatrical Release
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
A cold, rough look at the dissolution of just about everything. It will bother you afterward. It should.
Bardem is nothing less than the best movie villain since Anthony Hopkins slipped out of Hannibal Lecter's manacles, scary-smart and horrifyingly appealing, and Brolin is nothing short of a revelation.
The desert is as cold and bleak as McCarthy's view of humanity, so the laughs may not dare even leave your throat.
The storytelling is fluid, especially when directors Joel and Ethan Coen start eliding some of the murders and ask us to imagine them for ourselves.
The mood is darker and quieter than the Coens usually present, though some of the dialogue has a deadpan humor.
Working from a Cormac McCarthy novel that has the heedless, headlong force of an action movie screenplay, Joel and Ethan Coen have improved upon the original by giving it a visual lyricism to match McCarthy's verbal barrage.
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen build and sustain tension so masterfully throughout this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel that even trouble that's been telegraphed still shocks when it arrives.
The Coen brothers' best movie, hands down, is a chase film in which all the characters scatter their essences as they run.
Shockingly effective and incomprehensibly great, No Country for Old Men proves that the Coen Brothers are America's reigning motion picture Gods.
It's as close to a perfect film as I've seen all year: ingeniously crafted, thematically consistent, and haunting in its implications.
This is intense, provocative filmmaking on every level that is sure to be one of the best American films of the year.
... strong, evocative storytelling pared to the bone and braced with a sensibility perfectly matched to the material.
[N]o Coen human low-pressure system yet has been anything like the nightmare of centered psychosis that is Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh.
The story is vintage McCarthy in its sense of place and its poetic voice. And it is vintage Coens for some of those same traits, and its cruel, graphic violence.
This Coen Brothers adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel may be their darkest film yet. It's also one of their best.
It’s been six years and two movies since the Coen brothers directed a feature that didn’t embarrass the memory of everything else they’ve ever made, but, with No Country for Old Men, the writing-directing duo are back to old form.
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