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…