Well, this fresh in: whatever mosquito was buzzing in their ears is now a small red stain on the flock wallpaper. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo, with, dare we say it, a new maturity. There is also something back-to-basics about No Country For Old Men, adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s violent neo-Western. It’s got Blood Simple’s dark moves, that clammy sense of death lurking in the barren Texan landscape. And being a knotted tale of crime innately wrapped up in an imposing location, it shares DNA with Fargo and Miller’s Crossing.

What surprises is how the film remains both recognisably McCarthy’s terse and sorrowful parable, and a Coens enterprise bathed in oil-black humour. Despite the fact that the brothers lift much of the dialogue verbatim from the page, in the mouths of their cast the lines sound like choice Coenisms: all jazzy syncopations or deadpan comebacks. “If I don’t come back, tell my mother I love her,” Josh Brolin’s sort-of hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary
but perceptive wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he heads into the mouth of trouble. “Your mother’s dead,” she retorts. “Then I’ll tell her myself,” he sighs.

The plot is triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads seems to be taking centre stage. We start eyeing the tremulous determination of Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly wrong. Cadavers cook in the desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood, splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing two million dollars. He elects, as all noir folk are supposed to, to take the money and run. Bad move considering the clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a killer with the implacable dedication of a Terminator and the domed haircut of a psychopathic Monkee. What proceeds is a startling chase movie scattering through the border towns, grimy motels, and dry gulches of West Texas. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman longing for retirement, facing an evil that he can no longer decipher. This is a new crew for the brothers to play with. Jones is a perfect fit for the weatherworn Bell: he is Texan to his core, and looks as if he is entirely the product of McCarthy’s Biblical prose. Age has granted him stillness as a performer, and he gives the movie a grace above its lashing violence. Brolin, battered from pillar to post, is the strong, doomed heart of the story. But Bardem’s is the role with flamboyant possibilities — a stone-cold killer obsessed with chance, holding lives to the random toss of a quarter. He is the embodiment of evil as blank force made breathtakingly plausible. With his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a place not wholly human.

Those who find the Coens’ smarty-pants routines insufferable will find relief in the naturalism on show. This is not a world fastened beneath the hermetic seal of their whirligig genre-bending, but one that lives and breathes and bleeds. There is something resonant in Bell’s soulful philosophy, something tender in Moss’ love of his wife.

And we still get all the off-centre mannerisms that made the brothers so much fun to begin with. Although, silence is a tool we’ve not encountered before. Sure, Billy Bob Thornton barely uttered a syllable in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but we had his interior drawl. Here, between the bursts of visceral action, the film hangs on a terrifying soundlessness and the striking atonal power of sharp noises against nothingness: a bulb being unscrewed, a footfall on a wooden floor, the soft breath of wind over hardscrabble terrain. Even Carter Burwell’s score is defined by its imperceptibility — made up only of low groans and eerie whistles.

If the final act strikes out against formula to downplay rather than crescendo, it is true to the book. The simple satisfaction of traditional showdowns is evaded for a lyrical note that strikes both as deeply pessimistic and strangely pure. There is something of Miller’s Crossing’s noble farewell about it. Those brothers from another planet have returned to Earth.
Verdict
Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.

Big question: Can directors Joel and Ethan Coen, adapting the novel by Cormac McCarthy, reclaim their serious side after recent goofs like "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty"?

Catch it: So ferociously acted and executed that it practically takes a bite out of you, "No Country" is the kind of movie that if you miss a moment, you've missed it all. Not because it moves quickly--the Coens know exactly when to linger and when to pounce--but because everything about this chase is in the eerie stillness that hangs in the air, the calm before the storm that defines life on the run.

Skip it: If you think it's OK to hitchhike. Even a man who picks up Moss tells him he shouldn't be doing it!

Bottom line: You won't believe how great it is. Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography captures the beauty of the wide-open Texas terrain and the harsh pounding of bullets against flesh--a fierceness that's more than matched by Bardem's unforgettable performance. A story about the randomness of danger in a violent world we can't control, "No Country" is also darkly funny and a wonder to just take in, absorbing every second and remembering how it feels for a film to reach inside you and not let go.

That unpretty end takes the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an assassin who rivals Hannibal Lecter for dispatching his victims without breaking a sweat. Bardem, with pale skin and the world's worst haircut, is stupendous in the role, a monster for the ages. Beneath his dark eyes lies something darker, evil topped with the cherry of perverse humor. Chigurh carries around a bulky cattle gun. He'll politely ask a mark to get out of a car before he caps him in the head; that way the car won't get messy with gristle and brain matter. And he has this little game he plays. Staring at the human species like a visitor from another planet, Chigurh flips a coin. Your choice of heads or tails might just save your life. Only don't piss him off.

It's Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who comes down hard on Chigurh's bad side. Moss is a cowboy in a world with no more room for cowboys. He enjoys teasing his wife, Carla Jean (the excellent Kelly Macdonald), but you can feel his discontent. Then one day, when he's out hunting antelope, he gets his shot at the big score. Right out there in the desert are a half-dozen dead bodies drawing flies. One man, barely alive, sits in a truck and begs for water. It's a massacre. There's also a stash of heroin and $2 million in cash. Moss takes the cash and runs. Wouldn't you? That question sets up the film's moral dilemma and puts us in Moss' boots. This is Brolin's breakthrough — he rips into the role like a man possessed, giving Moss the human touch the part needs. Moss even returns to the scene that night with water for the dying man. Huge mistake. Shots ring out, and Moss, after packing his wife off to her folks, goes on the run with Chigurh on his tail and the sheriff tracking both of them.

That's all you'll hear from me about plot. The kick comes in watching all the gears mesh with thrilling exactitude. I've heard some carping about the ending, which stays tone-faithful to McCarthy instead of going for Hollywood pow. Hmm. I thought that'd be worth a cheer. No Country for Old Men offers an embarrassment of riches. Jones, Bardem and Brolin all give award-caliber performances. Roger Deakins again proves himself a poet of light and shadow as director of photography. Carter Burwell's insinuating score finds a way to nail every nuance without underlining a single one of them. Props are also due editor Roderick Jaynes, who no one's ever seen, since he's a pseudonym both Coen brothers hide behind.

I tend to get flustered when people ask me what I look for in movies, so I’m wary of theorizing too much about what other people want from them. Moviegoers generally seem to fall into one of two categories: those looking for experiences similar to ones they’ve already had and those looking for experiences that are new. Though I’m usually among the latter, I’m sometimes curious about why people return to certain pleasures, especially when I don’t share their taste.

One reason I tend to dislike movies about psycho killers is that I can’t respond to them with the devotion I feel is expected of me. I’m too distracted by the abundance of these characters on-screen when they rarely appear in real life, and by how popular they seem to become whenever we’re fighting a war. What is it about them that people find so exciting? Reviewing The Silence of the Lambs over 16 years ago, I was troubled by the way the thriller tapped into “irrational, mythical impulses that ultimately seem more theological than psychological,” and how critics who loved it seemed “better equipped to regurgitate the myth than to analyze it.”

I was especially bemused by the ready acceptance of Hannibal Lecter’s supernatural powers—his ability to convince a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, for instance, or to know precisely when and where to reach Clarice, the movie’s heroine, on the phone. Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning performance may be stark and commanding, but it wouldn’t have counted for beans if the audience hadn’t already been predisposed to accept this murderer as some sort of divine presence.

The waves of love that went out to Lecter, epitomized by the five top Oscars the movie received in 1992, were a mix of giggly fascination, twisted affection, and outright awe for his absolute lack of remorse. This was during the first gulf war, a time when we were grappling with our own feelings about killing masses of people on a daily basis. I suspect Lecter represented a savior of sorts, a saintlike holy psycho who made us feel less uneasy about wanton slaughter.

We may not feel the same kind of affection for the real psycho killers in our midst, but they do inspire similar fear, fascination, and mythologizing. Seung-Hui Cho was clearly crazy when he slaughtered 32 people at Virginia Tech last April, but he was also smart enough to know there was no question that if he sent a media kit off to the national press they’d use it. He might have had more power to get himself onto the cover of Newsweek than the editors would have had if they’d wanted to keep him off.

No Country for Old Men premiered at Cannes in May and was widely heralded as the festival’s most sensational entry. When I saw it for the first time at the Toronto film festival in September, the only movie that gave it any competition in the popularity contest was Lars and the Real Girl. Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.

Much the same could be said of Lars and the Real Girl, a fantasy about communal life in a small town that the Reader’s J.R. Jones has aptly described as “Capraesque,” not to mention an evasive (and no less endearing) glossing over of disturbed sexuality (astutely unpacked in the New York Times by Manohla Dargis). As someone who grew up in a small town, I could certainly detect the falsity of the film’s premise—that everybody cares about everybody else, fuckups included—while at the same time admiring the skill of the actors in putting it across. As for its popularity, I can only guess that it must be rooted in the rosy, highly sentimentalized picture it offers of human nature.

The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity. I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what use they think they’re putting that creativity and craft to. As I left the screening in Toronto, all I could think was, “America sure loves its mass murderers.” That conclusion was ratified by a line in the New York film festival’s blurb for the movie: “Wearing an unforgettably frightening pageboy and toting a cattle stun gun that’ll haunt your nightmares, Javier Bardem is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose detachment is as shocking as the carnage photographed so gorgeously by DP Roger Deakins.”

I hasten to add there’s more to this grim, ambitious movie than a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose carnage is gorgeously shot, though I seriously doubt it would be garnering so much enthusiasm without such perks. The intricate plot, set in rural Texas, involves three characters chasing after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a lovable salt-of-the-earth type who stumbles upon $2 million and a mess of dead bodies in the wake of a blown drug deal in the desert. There’s the narrator, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a melancholy sheriff nearing retirement who investigates the murders. There’s Chigurh, an associate of the drug dealers who’s bent on recovering the money and totally unconcerned with how many innocent people he wipes out in the process. (Recalling some of the stylish moves that made Pulp Fiction such a hit, he idly tortures some of his victims with arcane mind games before shooting them.) And finally there’s Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a hired gun who offers some comic relief.

This grisly thriller qualifies in some ways as a remake of the Coens’ Fargo, with Bell and Moss jointly taking over the role of Frances McDormand’s pregnant sheriff. Bell is the film’s moral center, the law in the midst of greed and senseless death. Moss, already marked by his relative indifference to the suffering of a dying Mexican in the opening sequence, becomes lovable only during his affectionate banter with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). He’s the character we’re supposed to identify with, especially when he’s trying to match wits with the psycho killer.

In the past, the Coens have gotten a lot of mileage out of ridiculing most country folk for their stupidity while singling out a chosen few for admiration. But here, in deference to the source material, the condescension is toned down considerably. They show off their narrative expertise by converting some of the sheriff’s plaintive monologues into terse dialogue and even more in the way they juxtapose the separate movements of Moss and Chigurh, sketching out a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game with some of the primal impact of silent pictures.

What gives all of this a special kick is the way the killer commits murder without so much as a twitch, behavior we’re clearly expected to regard with a certain amount of awe. Chigurh isn’t an intellectual like Hannibal Lecter, and he lacks his cosmopolitan sense of humor, but he slays many more innocent people. And except for a stray line toward the end of the film, when he briefly alludes to his own birth being occasioned by blind chance, there isn’t a trace of psychological speculation about what makes him tick—only a passing remark by Carson Wells that he operates according to a twisted moral code of his own.

Early in the film (and in the novel), Sheriff Bell recalls arresting a boy who killed a 14-year-old girl. Some people described it as a crime of passion, but Bell says the boy had wanted to kill someone for as long as he could remember, that he knew he was going to hell, and that he would kill again if he could. The story brings to mind the Misfit, a character in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” who randomly wipes out an entire family in a comparable act of nihilistic desperation.

In O’Connor’s vision, perfectly captured in a mere 16 pages, the Misfit is an emblem of religious despair, but in the less considered genre mechanics of Cormac McCarthy and the Coens, religious despair is nothing more than an alibi for violence. It’s invoked as a way of covering all the bases, tapping into fundamentalist fatalism without really buying into it. Bell’s wounded sense of morality in the face of so much bloodshed frames the action, but one reason why I suspect some critics reject this device while embracing everything else is that they intuit how little conviction the Coens bring to it.

There’s a certain cleverness in the way the Coens, after piling on the corpses in the opening sequences, elide some of Chigurh’s actual murders toward the end, flattering the audience by suggesting they’re sophisticated enough to imagine the gorgeous carnage all by themselves. They even manage to acknowledge briefly the relevance of all this mayhem to the present occupation of Iraq (albeit somewhat anachronistically, as the action is set in 1980). At one point, Bell ruefully reflects to a colleague, “It’s just all-out war—there isn’t any other word for it,” and goes on to comment about the sad times we’re living in, when some people even resort to senseless torture, making particular allusion to Abu Ghraib by mentioning a torturer placing a dog collar around the neck of one of his victims.

That unpretty end takes the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an assassin who rivals Hannibal Lecter for dispatching his victims without breaking a sweat. Bardem, with pale skin and the world's worst haircut, is stupendous in the role, a monster for the ages. Beneath his dark eyes lies something darker, evil topped with the cherry of perverse humor. Chigurh carries around a bulky cattle gun. He'll politely ask a mark to get out of a car before he caps him in the head; that way the car won't get messy with gristle and brain matter. And he has this little game he plays. Staring at the human species like a visitor from another planet, Chigurh flips a coin. Your choice of heads or tails might just save your life. Only don't piss him off.

It's Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who comes down hard on Chigurh's bad side. Moss is a cowboy in a world with no more room for cowboys. He enjoys teasing his wife, Carla Jean (the excellent Kelly Macdonald), but you can feel his discontent. Then one day, when he's out hunting antelope, he gets his shot at the big score. Right out there in the desert are a half-dozen dead bodies drawing flies. One man, barely alive, sits in a truck and begs for water. It's a massacre. There's also a stash of heroin and $2 million in cash. Moss takes the cash and runs. Wouldn't you? That question sets up the film's moral dilemma and puts us in Moss' boots. This is Brolin's breakthrough — he rips into the role like a man possessed, giving Moss the human touch the part needs. Moss even returns to the scene that night with water for the dying man. Huge mistake. Shots ring out, and Moss, after packing his wife off to her folks, goes on the run with Chigurh on his tail and the sheriff tracking both of them.

That's all you'll hear from me about plot. The kick comes in watching all the gears mesh with thrilling exactitude. I've heard some carping about the ending, which stays tone-faithful to McCarthy instead of going for Hollywood pow. Hmm. I thought that'd be worth a cheer. No Country for Old Men offers an embarrassment of riches. Jones, Bardem and Brolin all give award-caliber performances. Roger Deakins again proves himself a poet of light and shadow as director of photography. Carter Burwell's insinuating score finds a way to nail every nuance without underlining a single one of them. Props are also due editor Roderick Jaynes, who no one's ever seen, since he's a pseudonym both Coen brothers hide behind.

OK, then. How does No Country for Old Men stack up against the best work of these artfully merry pranksters? Near the top, I'd say. There are echoes of Fargo when a deputy declares, "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" and the sheriff answers, "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here." And admirers of Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink and even The Big Lebowski will find tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on. But this landmark of a movie is fresh territory for the Coens, accused, often unfairly, of glib facility and lack of passionate purpose. Screw that. Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world. No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making.

Peter Travers

For their part, Joel and Ethan Coen, with both credited equally for writing and directing, are back on top of their game after some less than stellar outings. While brandishing the brothers' customary wit and impeccable craftsmanship, pic possess the vitality and invention of top-drawer 1970s American filmmaking, quite an accomplishment these days. It's also got one of cinema's most original and memorable villains in recent memory, never a bad thing in attracting an audience, especially as so audaciously played by Javier Bardem.

Set in rugged, parched West Texas (but filmed in New Mexico) and brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins in tones that resemble shafts of wheat examined in myriad different lights, yarn commences with several startling sequences: A crime suspect (Bardem) turns the tables on his arresting officer, strangles him with his handcuffs, then kills a driver for his car using a cattle stun gun ; in the middle of nowhere, a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles across five trucks, several bullet-ridden corpses, a huge stash of drugs and $2 million in a briefcase, which he impulsively takes. When he returns to the scene of the crime that night, he's shot at by unknown men and chased into a nearby river by a fierce dog before getting away.

Central figures in this tale of pursuit are rounded out by Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the local county sheriff, who tours the truck crime scene on horseback and in short order gets Moss in his sights, although not as quickly as does Bardem's Anton Chigurh, who is able to tune in to a transponder in the moneybag the unsuspecting Moss has stashed in a heating duct in a local motel.

Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise. Clearly a killer by profession, the lucid, direct-talking man considers anyone else who crosses his path fair game; if everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. "You don't have to do this," the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor.

In addition to the pared down dialogue, pic is marked by silences, wind-inflected ones to be found naturally in the empty expanses of the West, as well as breathlessly suspenseful interior interludes, notably an ultra-Hitchcockian sequence in which Moss, aware that Chigurh has tracked him to an old hotel, listens and waits in his room as his hunter comes quietly to his door.

It's amazing how much carnage ensues given that the action essentially focuses upon three men playing cat-and-mouse across a beautiful and brutal landscape. Three guys in the wrong motel room at the wrong time get the treatment from Chigurh, and a cocky intermediary (Woody Harrelson) for the missing money's apparent rightful owner makes the mistake of getting in between the trigger-happy assassin and Moss. And they're far from the only victims in a story that disturbingly portrays the nature of the new violence stemming, in the view advanced here, from the combination of the drug trade and the disintegration of societal mores.

The manner in which the narrative advances is shocking and nearly impossible to predict; viewers who haven't read the best-seller will be gripped by the situations put onscreen and sometimes afraid to see what they fear will happen next. Those familiar with the story will be gratified to behold a terrific novel make the shift in medium managed, for once, with such smarts.

The Coens build a sense of foreboding from the outset without being heavy or pretentious about it. They have consistently worked in the crime genre, of course, beginning with their first film, "Blood Simple," whose seriousness perhaps mostly approximates the tone of this one, although there are overlaps as well with "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." But while they have eliminated one especially poignant character from the book in the interests of time, slashed Bell's distinctive philosophical ruminations and perhaps unduly hastened the ending, the brothers have honored McCarthy's serious themes, the integrity of his characters and his essential intentions.

They have also beefed up the laughs, the majority of which stem from the unlikely source of the cold-blooded Chigurh. From the outset, the powerful and commanding Bardem leaves no doubt that Chigurh would just as soon kill you as ask you the time of day. His conversation brooks no nonsense or evasion. But it is the character's utter lack of humor that Bardem and the Coens cleverly offer as the source of the character's humorousness, and the actor makes the most of this approach in a diabolically effective performance.

Jones would practically seem to have been born to play Cormac McCarthy roles, and he proves it here in a quintessential turn as a proud longtime sheriff dismayed by what he sees things coming to. Holding his own in distinguished company after long dwelling in TV and schlock, Brolin gives off young Nick Nolte vibes as an ordinary man who tries to outsmart some big boys in order to get away with the score of his life.

Scottish thesp Kelly Macdonald registers potently as Moss' country wife, while tasty supporting turns are delivered by Harrelson, Stephen Root as the latter character's employer, Rodger Boyce as a sheriff who commiserates with Bell, Barry Corbin as Bell's crusty old uncle, Ana Reeder as a swimming pool floozy who offers Moss some company and Gene Jones as the old fellow Chigurh makes call his own fate.

Deakins' stunning location work and precision framing is joined by Jess Gonchor's production design, the Coens' cutting under their usual pseudonym of Roderick Jaynes, Carter Burwell's discreet score and expert sound work to make "No Country for Old Men" a total visual and aural pleasure.

Todd McCarthy.

"Hold still" is also something that the Coen Brothers seem to be saying to the audience throughout No Country for Old Men, which is the most measured, classical film of their 23-year career, and maybe the best. Coming on the heels of the shrill, mannered Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, you'd scarcely have thought them capable of it. There are echoes of earlier Coen films here—in the Texas setting (Blood Simple) and the idea of simple, small-town folk caught up in criminal business (Fargo). But unlike the loquacious eccentrics that the Coens have placed at the center of most of their movies, the characters in No Country for Old Men are stoic, solitary figures who feel most at home in desolate landscapes, alone but for their fellow predators. And we become one with them, seeing and (especially) hearing things as they do—subtle anomalies in the atmosphere and terrain, like the faint jangling of keys in an abandoned vehicle in a desert clearing where bad men have recently been engaging in bad business. It is to this grisly scene—a drug deal gone awry—that Chigurh journeys in search of a briefcase piled high with cash (two million in 1980 dollars). But Moss has been there first, and he left just enough of a scent for Chigurh to track.

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is, for most of its running time, a cleverly triangulated cat-and-mouse pursuit in which Chigurh stays a few short paces behind Moss, while the sheriff, Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), closes in on them both. And if Chigurh is the movie's phantom bogeyman, then Bell is its moral compass, albeit one with its needle pointing straight to hell. A onetime believer in the forces of law and order, he has been worn down by what he sees on his beat and reads in the newspapers and has the look of a man searching for salvation in a godless world. Whether the good old days Bell pines for—the one where evil had a more easily recognizable face—ever existed is another matter entirely, one No Country for Old Men doesn't endeavor to resolve.

The mechanics of No Country for Old Men recall those of a vintage film noir—as gripping and mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as The Killing and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were before it. In terms of filmmaking and storytelling craft, it is a work destined to be studied in film schools for generations to come, from the threatening beauty of cinematographer Roger Deakins's O'Keeffe-like images to what is surely the most pulse-raising scene of motel-room suspense since Marion Crane took her fateful shower. There isn't a moment here that feels false, less than fully considered, or outside of the Coens' control. (Nor does the movie ever feel studied and inert in the way movies so carefully planned and executed sometimes can.) Then there is Bardem, whose Chigurh is so fully realized psychologically and physically that his every gesture bristles with creepy fascination, whether he's baiting an unsuspecting gas-station attendant into a life-or-death coin toss or merely sidestepping the encroaching puddle of blood he's created on a hotel-room floor.

It's easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles' heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy's taciturn Texans into simplistic western-mythos archetypes: the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically good-hearted rube in over his head. Instead, they've made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like "hero" and "villain" carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys. Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward. "They slaughter cattle a lot different these days," sighs a weary Bell late in the film. But slaughter them they still do, and in the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction. Even Anton Chigurh, it turns out, bleeds when wounded.

It's set in the Tex-Mex borderlands, and I suppose you could categorize it as a neo-Western, although, like the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based, the film is far too spacious and elemental to be so easily typed. Joel and Ethan Coen, the co-writer-directors, have done an impeachable job of capturing McCarthy's hardbitten, oracular eloquence. At the same time, with its dizzying alternations of comedy and horror, the film is unmistakably a Coen brothers movie – albeit a much better one than they've made in a while.

The story is set in motion in a remote area where a West Texas hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, in a starmaking performance), accidentally stumbles across the bloody, corpse-strewn scene of a drug deal gone bad. He makes off with the 2 million dollars in a briefcase that's lying about but he's enough of a hunter to know he'll be pursued for it. What he doesn't figure on is that his chief pursuer will be a human Terminator named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) whose preferred mode of killing is a cattle stun gun.

In a sense, Bell, Moss, and Chigurh represent the range of human response to death and dying. Bell, who quickly sizes up Moss's involvement, is an old school lawman with an almost philosophic appreciation for the moral weaknesses of fallen men. Chigurh is a relentless killing machine who, in hunting Moss down, blithely eliminates anyone who gets in the way. But even he has his philosophical side: At key moments he offers his victims a coin toss to determine their fate.

Moss, who fought in Vietnam, is a crafty survivor, and we are encouraged to identify with him as he slips in and out of Chigurh's traps. As unthinking as he was about stealing the millions – he wanted to impress his wife (Kelly Macdonald) with a better life – we can't help wanting Moss to triumph, or at the very least, survive.

As actors, the three leads are also a study in contrast. Jones, soulfully taciturn, gives Bell a deep down mellowness and vulnerability. Brolin is a live-wire whose body is attuned to every quiver of alarm in the landscape. Bardem, with his impassive, blocklike face and Prince Valiant haircut, is a totemic bad guy, so humorless he's humorous.

"No Country For Old Men" can be enjoyed purely as a great chase picture but, as it accumulates force, the chase begins to take on the trappings of something larger and more allegorical. When an attack dog is set loose on Moss as they both paddle furiously across a river, the nightmarishness of the moment is almost unbearable. The inexorability of Chigurh's pursuit is total, and it comes to resemble the doom that, in McCarthy's view, awaits us all. His nihilism has a biblical fury.

The West of this movie is not the Old West – there's something more lethal, more unforgiving about it. The only saving grace is Bell's humanism, and we can see that this will soon become a thing of the past. The Coen brothers don't mess around with McCarthy's fatalism or provide a glad fadeout, and this may upset audiences who want to see the world righted by the end. But the movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

by Peter Rainer.

That's a mistake, but not his first. Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy (author of All The Pretty Horses and last year's Pulitzer-and-Oprah-approved The Road), No Country For Old Men takes place in the same harsh world as McCarthy's novels. Life can end quickly, senselessly, and grotesquely, leaving survivors shocked but wiser. But it's a world with a moral force, however mysterious and unsparing of innocence.

Brolin has found blood money, and blood attracts blood. Soon, he's hunted by hired killer Javier Bardem, whose delicate Prince Valiant bob is more than counterbalanced by his handiness with a pneumatic slaughterhouse tool. Their chase invites the attention of one character after another (including Tommy Lee Jones' laconic, soon-to-retire small-town sheriff) as it moves them from one awkward situation to the next.

No Country For Old Men bears McCarthy's unmistakable stamp, and the equally unmistakable mark of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, making a strong return after a few years off. Their latest works as a continuation of their modern noirs Blood Simple and Fargo, but also as a shaggy-dog tale in the mold of The Big Lebowski.

Only this time, there's a trail of blood that grows darker and wider as the film winds toward a revelation about the overwhelming realness of evil, and its persistence in the modern world: Its essence changes, but not its form. As Jones prepares for retirement, he slips into talk about the way the world used to be, as opposed to the harder shape it's begun to take. (Both film and book are set, not accidentally, as the '70s give way to the '80s, and the drugs-and-money cycle of violence began to escalate.) But the ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.

Though several performances are noteworthy, it is Javier Bardem's rootless and sadistic monster that makes the most indelible, skin-crawling impression in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel.

The movie is a faithful rendering that is unnerving enough to elicit an occasional gasp while still affording opportunity to muse on its larger concerns: the pervasiveness of violence and lawlessness in modern society. The down-home Texan-flavored dialogue — some of it lifted directly from the book — is comfortingly familiar and serves as a jarring counterpoint to the onslaught of hideous violence.

The story and the way the Coens tell it feel simultaneously age-old and contemporary. Though the Western landscape has been mythologized, the focus is on a new frontier: a no-man's land where rules don't apply and the drug trade flourishes.

The film hinges on a trio of archetypal characters: the loner cowboy (Josh Brolin), the villainous outlaw (Bardem) and the wise and decent sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones, having an especially good year with this and In the Valley of Elah). Supporting parts by Tess Harper, Kelly Macdonald and Woody Harrelson also are strong and multidimensional.

Set in 1980 on the Texas-Mexico border, the story opens with Army veteran Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) hunting in the Texas scrub. He spots a pickup surrounded by bodies and happens on a stash of heroin and a valise neatly filled with $2 million. When Moss takes the satchel, he sets in motion a chain of events that will keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

Moss knows his pursuers will not give up. "How long would you keep looking for $2 million?" he muses rhetorically.

Several unsavory types are on his tail, and the worst of them is the mysterious psychopath Anton Chigurh (Bardem), whose idea of mercy is letting a victim flip a coin, allowing a 50% possibility of survival. His sadism is remorseless and capricious. Not since Hannibal Lecter have we seen a killer this methodical and darkly funny.

Then there's Sheriff Bell (Jones), who is as decent as Chigurh is evil. Though disillusioned, he's the conscience of the story, and Jones plays him perfectly.

What unfolds is much more than a drug deal gone bad. The Coen brothers have fashioned a wry and riveting hybrid of a drama, Western, crime thriller and action film that is as powerful and thought-provoking as it is genre-bending.

Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, the West Texas–set picture kicks off with grim, sere landscapes, setting the tableaus for the gruesome introduction of its villain, a mysterious psychopath name Anton Chigurh with a novel method of blowing door locks off and human brains out. Bardem's magnificently creepy Chigurh breaks out of police custody in a scene that will have most viewers gouging the stuffing out of their armrests; whatever this guy is after, we know right away that he's not going to let anything impede his getting it. After this, affable would-be deer gunner Llewellyn Moss (Brolin), out on an unsuccessful hunt, happens on the human-and-animal-corpse-strewn aftermath of a drug deal gone very bad. Sure enough — Brolin drawls a perfect "Yeah" as he makes the discovery — there's a satchel full of loot on the dusty scene, and Moss makes off with it to his trailer park. Chigurh, whose hobby of deciding whether or not to kill someone based on a coin flip is one of his lesser eccentricities (and whose look recalls that of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight — no, really), is of course the man with a claim on the money. The often brutal cat-and-mouse game that ensues between the two characters affords the Coens the opportunity to create some of the most imaginative and excruciating suspense set pieces of their, or anybody else's, career. Tommy Lee Jones, whose character sets the film's tone with an elegiac voice-over at the beginning, is frequently hilarious as laconic (what else?) sheriff Ed Tom Bell, but it's his character who carries the moral weight of the story, and the decisions he makes as he comes to the end of the line, and a potential confrontation with pure evil, is what finally gives the film an enigmatic, haunting quality. Mulling over the story's climactic tragedy, Bell and another law officer discuss how the world's going to hell in a hand basket ever since kids started dying their hair green and stopped saying "sir" and "ma'am"; but a little later, visiting an old man who's both kin and a mentor to him, Bell is told "What you're seeing…is nothing new…. You can't stop what's coming." No you can't, and this movie aims to make you feel the truth of that statement in your bones.

Woody Harrelson as an investigator who fancies himself something of an expert on Chigurh, and Kelly MacDonald as Brolin's sweet, trusting wife, add fantastic texture and depth to this twisted, can't-look-away tale. (As do Garret Dillahunt as Bell's slightly dim deputy, and Tess Harper as Bell's wife.) Some rumblings are going on in both mainstream and internet movie-musing circles about the ending of the picture, which turns ruminant, elides what some might consider major high points of the story, and goes for something deeper and more thoroughly unsettling than the filmmakers have ever attempted before. (And also, I ought to say, hews very closely to McCarthy's own ending.) On first viewing I wasn't so sure about it myself. Second time around, I think it's perfect. And I think No Country is a picture to which I can apply that very vexed word "masterpiece" with no hesitation or compunction.

This really isn't a movie to watch on DVD, though.

You need as big a screen as possible to savor Roger Deakins' sweeping cinematography, which is as integral to the movie's triumph as the edge-of-the-seat direction by Joel and Ethan Coen - or a trio of unforgettable performances by Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones.

Adapting (and, if you ask me, surpassing) a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy into their best-ever movie and their first Best Picture contender since "Fargo," the Coens deliver a classic, neo-noir Western of innocence lost set in 1980 Texas.

The film's moral center is Jones' Sheriff Bell, about ready to retire after watching the Mexican border turn red with drug trade. With a face as deeply etched as Mount Rushmore, Bell surveys the massive carnage from a heroin deal gone bad on the Texas prairie with disgust and resignation.

We've already seen an earlier visitor to the same shootout scene, a hunter named Llewelyn (Brolin) who discovers $2 million in cash in a satchel and is foolish enough to think he can keep the money and live to tell about it.

Bell has been around long enough to know Llewelyn is a gravely marked man. One of his deputies who arrests a man looking for the money ends up garroted by his own handcuffs.

The killer (Bardem), who sports a Prince Valiant haircut and invites some of his victims to flip a coin to determine their fates, is dubbed a "ghost" by the baffled sheriff.

Not only is he virtually impossible to track, but it takes quite a while for Bell to even figure out this psychopath is grotesquely killing people with a compressed-air gun normally used to slaughter cattle.

Bardem's character, Chigurh, is by contrast ruthlessly efficient at tracking down not only poor Llewelyn but his understandably terrified wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald).

At first, "No Country for Old Men" seems like another crime story, smarter than most, filmed and acted with extra care and attention, but a crime story all the same. And then a shift comes - not an abrupt shift of plot or mood, but something that has been gradually built, shot by shot, scene by scene - and it begins to dawn that this is something remarkable.

Other movies remain on the outside, even good ones. "No Country for Old Men" burrows underneath and makes a home in the pit of your stomach. What it is and what it says elude easy definition. The movie is a meditation on American violence and the nature of evil, but it's bigger than that. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy and written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, "No Country" feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

To see it is like encountering some elemental, wordless truth that everybody knows inside but tries not to face. The movie puts a big hand on your head and forces you to look. Lies, including many so common to movies that we no longer see them, are debunked. "No Country" is not about comforting viewers but disturbing them, and it's not about entertaining in the moment, but about showing something that will linger for days, not with a glow but like the remaining traces of an illness.

That the movie is set in 1980 is perfect. A feeling of pessimism pervaded, of living in a culture in decline, in which everything, including money, was rapidly losing value and crime was rampant. It seems as if things would never get better and would certainly get worse, and worse is embodied here by Javier Bardem as a psychopathic killer, who goes around carrying a tank with a hose attached to it. Does he have emphysema? No, it's an air gun used to kill cattle. He uses it on people.

The first sign that "No Country for Old Men" might be extraordinary comes in the opening minutes, when the psychopath, Anton, strangles someone with a pair of handcuffs. It's the expression on Bardem's face. He looks transported, stimulated and delighted, not in a sexual way (which would have been a cliche), but in some strange way alien to everyone else, as though he's plugged into hell's wall socket. He is truly alive only then, and this makes him someone who can't be talked to. He's not exactly human in the usual sense of the term.

It's startling just how much good writing and good direction can get out of a story about a suitcase filled with money. Josh Brolin plays a welder named Moss who comes across one filled with $2 million. It's in an open field, outside a town not far from Mexico, the site of a mass slaughter. The camera lingers on the dead bodies, some drug deal apparently gone very wrong. Moss does what most people would do, he takes the money, and eventually that puts Anton on his trail. That also puts Tommy Lee Jones, as the sheriff, on the trail of both.

Though Brolin and Bardem probably get more screen time, Jones is the movie's conscience and moral locus. Maybe 15 years ago, the sheriff was as cocksure as the marshal that Jones played in "The Fugitive," but he's weary now. He's older. He's facing retirement, and the evil that he has been encountering in his work is so beyond his understanding that he feels off balance. The movie suggests something frightening: not that the sheriff is off balance because he's getting old but that his age is causing him to see things as they are. In "No Country," the dark revelation of old age is that of the existence of absolute evil and of the essential pointlessness and tragedy of life on earth.

Everything Jones has done onscreen has been in preparation for this role: his willingness to face the worst. His integrity that won't bend to convention. His Southwestern stoicism. His bitter, rueful humor. These elements can be found in many or most of his performances, but they've never been so realized as they are here. In "No Country for Old Men," Jones stares into an abyss. If through him, we don't see that abyss ourselves, then it's only a good movie. But we do, so it's a great movie, and a great performance.

The Coen brothers' screenplay is faithful to McCarthy without being obsequious. In filming it, they play it straight, and the touches of signature humor that are there don't seem like flashes of style, but organic and right. When you're this skilled, you don't have to be flashy.

-- Advisory: Graphic and very personal and disturbing violence.

Essentially the film, which is set in the 1980s, is a triangle. At its apex is a sweet-soul named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Out hunting one day he come upon a whole bunch of dead guys, burned out cars and a stash of drugs and a couple million dollars. Obviously, a nefarious deal has gone very wrong and the young man sees no reason not to avail himself of its residue. He's madly in love with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) and would like to buy her some nice things. He, however, reckons without Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who is an all-star psychopath. His preferred murder weapon is a pneumatic device the ranchers use to put livestock out of their misery and he sometimes asks his potential victims to flip a coin. If they call the toss correctly they live; if they don't they die. Across from him in McCarthy's radically simplified story structure is Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the patient and taciturn local sheriff. He comes from a long line of lawmen, and is having trouble comprehending the rising tide of motiveless malignity in his jurisdiction. It has something to do with modernity creeping across his dimly drawn county line, though such abstractions are beyond Ed Tom's comprehension. Mostly, he's uneasily contemplating retirement.

What we have here is a classic Coen Brothers situation: like Fargo, Miller's Crossing or Blood Simple this movie is about the intrusion of hyperkinetic violence in a normally peaceful setting, a place where the inhabitants truly treasure the phlegmatic life and are profoundly puzzled by people who would disturb their peace. Does this make No Country for Old Men a black comedy of sorts? I suppose it does. But that's not a thought that occurs to you until the movie is over and you find yourself shaking your head and chuckling over the curiously exaggerated behavior you've just witnessed. Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing.

Especially, I think, by Bardem. He's got a totally weird haircut and an eerily calm manner, smiling and soft-spoken. He is also an incredibly efficient killing machine. The shock of his sudden depredations — pow, you're dead — grants the movie some of its very curious rhythm. It has a rather calm and objective air about it most of the time. But whenever Bardem appears, something nasty starts twisting in your gut. He's about as perfect a representation of unambiguous evil as the movies have lately offered. And Brolin is his perfect foil. He's terrific as a totally twisted cop in American Gangster, but he's equally good as a totally innocent good ole boy here. All right, trying to make off with someone else's ill-gotten gains is maybe not entirely smart or entirely moral. But there's something pure and sweet about the young man, too, and a certain surprising shrewdness about him, too. He keeps managing to stay a lively, often imaginative, step ahead of his implacable pursuer until?