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…

The Coen Brothers created a monster far more hideous and vile than Frankenstien's monster!

If death had a name it would be Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem)! I haven't been this creeped out by a deranged killer since 1991's Silence of the lambs!

The Coen Brothers film didn't take my breath away it choked the life out of me with pure unadulterated good ole fashioned terror!

Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss was easy on the eyes! He was the easy going charismatic good ole boy whose 1 bad decision guaranteed him a dance with the devil! In my opinion this is his most powerful performance to date!

Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell the soothing voice of reason and wisdom!…

I am going to have the opportunity to review this again a number of times because I had the good fortune to see it again in the theater a number of times this summer. CGV has become really good about bringing back older movies and filling up a bunch of showtimes with stuff that does not play on TV very much. This run happened to coincide with a period where I was on my own for a few weeks and I wound up seeing it seven times, once with my graduate student Michael. This is an amazing movie and I had to up my score after reflecting on how I was practically being driven to see this in the theater.…