No Country for Old Men

A film set in Texas in the early 1980s. Moss is out hunting in the desert and finds a scene. Several pickups, bodies, drugs and a case holding two million dollars. He takes the money. That night he goes back, and the going back starts everything. A man comes after him. Chigurh bargains with nobody, never raises his voice in any scene, and settles some of his decisions with a coin. The third person is a sheriff. Old, tired, and always a step behind the events. From there the film is a pursuit. Motels, border towns, a dog, an air duct and a chase that lasts all night. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but change: the sheriff says throughout that the world has turned into something he cannot follow, and the film neither agrees nor disagrees with him. There is almost no music. All the sound is wind, footsteps, doors and breathing, and the tension comes from there. The narrative does not show one of its most important events on screen. The audience learns about it afterwards, and this breaks the structure on purpose. The last scene is a dream told at a breakfast table, not an action. The source is a novel by Cormac McCarthy and the film is unusually faithful to it. Javier Bardem won an Academy Award for the part; the film also won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly Macdonald are in the cast. Joel and Ethan Coen directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes cold, quiet films that get their tension from editing. Who it is not for: anyone expecting closure; the narrative ends without resolving and that is deliberate.