No Country for Old Men is an allegorical modern western that captures a country in transition, thus commenting on present day society and providing an almost nostalgic analysis of the nature of good and evil and the inescapable stranglehold of fate.

Sticking to most genre rules, only to pull out the rug from underneath you at the very end, No Country for Old Men together with There Will be Blood seem to best represent what the modern Western can be. They are almost polar opposites in how they approach what they try to say, but they're still sides of the same coin.

On a literal level the plot is very straightforward, carried by a host of intriguing characters and can…

Sometimes, the rawest of tension can be created by pure silence. The lack of a main score (or any use of music), the quite dialogue between characters, and the vast, empty landscapes of the desert, all of it makes the short bursts of violence all the more gut wrenching and disturbing.

This is one of the most intense films I've seen in a good while, even though most of the time, not a whole lot happened. Usually you'd get the odd moment of Anton shooting a man or one shoot out, but throughout, the tension comes from the fear and knowledge that something WILL happen and someone MIGHT be getting their head blown off....

And yet, even during these moments,…

This is the first time I’ve re-watched the Coen classic since when it was first out in theatres. After re-watching The Man Who Wasn’t There with our neighbours a few weeks ago, I’ve been hankering to revisit what I consider their darkest film. Where the Coens other dark outings are lined with bone dry ironic humor, No Country for Old Men is all serious business.

The Coen trademark noir-esque elements of misbehaviour and consequences are here, but where nature and circumstance dictate the outcome in their other films, here, nature and circumstance is embodied in a character, Anton Chigurh. Javier Bardem is a force of nature wrapped up in a bad hairdo. The sheer weightiness he brings to Chigurh is…

This remains one of the best edited films I've ever seen. Truly a masterclass in building and maintaining tension without ever feeling monochromatic.

The key (IMHO) is that a lot of the expository / background color scenes go on longer than you think it will, and then when the violence does come it generally comes out of nowhere it and it is over a lot quicker than you think it will be. The first Anton Chigurh interrogation scene (the "call it friend-o" one) lasts several beats longer than you think it will; the final one (with Mrs. Moss right after her mom's funeral) is a lot shorter than you would expect. As a result you can't ever trust that you're…