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No Country for Old Men
A major Coen brothers movie drawn from a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, this is a highly accomplished thriller that's also rather hypocritical when it tries to get moralistic about its bloodbaths. (Even more than its source, it taps into fundamentalist religious despair as an alibi for the violence.) Javier Bardem plays a psycho killer with a cattle stun gun, and Tommy Lee Jones costars as a Texas sheriff nearing retirement who wonders what the world's coming to. Josh Brolin is a welder who stumbles upon $2 million left in the wake of a blown drug deal and gets tracked by Jones, Bardem, and Woody Harrelson (a hired gun and comic relief). 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. R, 122 min. |
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