ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

JOEL AND ETHAN COEN are past masters of the dark, disturbing thriller. Their best films like Blood Simple and Fargo are all about desperate men driven to random acts of fatal foolishness.

No Country For Old Men gives them the perfect source material in the acclaimed novel by Cormac McCarthy and the result is a Biblical saga of crime and retribution that is tipped to become a leading Oscar and BAFTA contender.

Strikingly shot by Roger Deakins, No Country For Old Men is set around the desolate landscapes of the Tex-Mex border and offers an elegiac evocation of an American heartland in moral meltdown. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the man who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time.

Stumbling across the bloody aftermath of a drugs deal, he finds himself in possession of more than $2 million in cash. He believes he can use the money to provide a better future for his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) if they live long enough to spend it.

His fate lies in the hands of two men – remorseless psychopath Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a man baffled by a world that seems to have lost all regard for decency and compassion.

A chase thriller marbled with shocking violence and bone-dry black humour, No Country For Old Men features a chilling performance from Bardem as the embodiment of human evil and an effective one from Scots actress Kelly Macdonald in a relatively brief role.

There is a lack of coherence in the closing stages of the film and a certain emotional reserve in the telling but this is a bleak, fatalistic tale of the evil that men do and it is thoroughly engrossing.

Nationwide release

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Stars: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald, Woody Harrelson
Screenwriter: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
Certificate: 15
Running time: 123 mins
Country: USA
Year: 2007