No Country for Old Men Reviews
For a film that traffics in implacable malice, this movie remains remarkably grounded in the everyday.
McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony.
A masterly tale of the good, the deranged and the doomed that inflects the raw violence of the west with a wry acknowledgement of the demise of codes of honour, this is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative.
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| Original Score: 5/6
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.
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| Original Score: A
Joel and Ethan Coen have directed their best film since Fargo more than a decade ago.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
What makes the movie a masterpiece, however, is not the Coens' supreme command of their craft in these scenes, but their willingness to embrace the resigned worldview of McCarthy's novel.
| Original Score: 4/4
[It] just might be the Coen brothers' singular mythic masterwork.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A cold, rough look at the dissolution of just about everything. It will bother you afterward. It should.
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| Original Score: A
Bardem is nothing less than the best movie villain since Anthony Hopkins slipped out of Hannibal Lecter's manacles, scary-smart and horrifyingly appealing, and Brolin is nothing short of a revelation.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The mood is darker and quieter than the Coens usually present, though some of the dialogue has a deadpan humor.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Working from a Cormac McCarthy novel that has the heedless, headlong force of an action movie screenplay, Joel and Ethan Coen have improved upon the original by giving it a visual lyricism to match McCarthy's verbal barrage.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The story is vintage McCarthy in its sense of place and its poetic voice. And it is vintage Coens for some of those same traits, and its cruel, graphic violence.
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| Original Score: 5/5
The Coens are wintry and dead calm ironists, and their movie is finally less an assault on our sensibilities than a subtle -- and possibly permanent -- insinuation into our consciousnesses.
No Country for Old Men may just be the year's best picture.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 4/4
No Country for Old Men is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, but it shows all the Coen strengths. One is a genuine interest in the way people work.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
No Country for Old Men is the first movie I've seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece. It's such a stunning achievement in storytelling.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The film is as lean and mean as a barbed-wire necktie, darkly funny and much deeper than the average crime thriller.
| Original Score: 4/4
The Coens are geniuses at creating tension through editing. No Country has craft and atmosphere aplenty.
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| Original Score: B
As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we've ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Coens understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.
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| Original Score: 4/4
An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
No Country for Old Men is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made Fargo.
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| Original Score: 4/4
An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, maybe the best they've done, period.
For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- No Country for Old Men is pure heaven.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
The result, while it may be their most ambitious and successful film in years, remains just a Coen brothers movie, a curio to collect rather than an experience to remember.
Bardem's unnerving performance is the one that will stay with you.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
This acerbic, darkly poetic Coen brothers' take on the Cormac McCarthy novel is calculated to give you the willies.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
I just don't like it very much.
It's their best work in a while and it's probably going to end up being the year's best movie.
This measured yet excitingly tense, violent yet maturely sorrowful thriller marks the first time the filmmakers have faithfully adapted somebody else's work to their own specifications and considerable strengths.
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| Original Score: A-
The ending is so lame it made me feverish. Then I remembered the perfection that came before it, and concluded that this is, without question, the best movie ever made by the eccentric Coen brothers.
The Coens know how a thing or two about pacing, and it's relentless here. The story is full of unexpected twists and switchbacks, and opportunities for the audience to gear down and take a breath are few and far between.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This film is an evil delight; adapted from Cormack McCarthy's book, it's filled with suspense, pitch-black humor and one of the most memorable villains in recent cinema.
If I want wry lawmen and smart, calculating fugitives, I'll get them from Elmore Leonard; and, if I want Leonard, I'll take him neat, rather than slow-filtered, drop by drop, through a layer of Faulkner, then laced with the Book of Jeremiah.
Here's the gist: It's a near masterpiece.
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.
| Original Score: 4/4
I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn't.
Feels less like a breathing, thinking movie than an exercise. That may be partly because it's an adaptation of a book by a contemporary author who's usually spoken of in hushed, respectful, hat-in-hand tones.
Globe and Mail
Top CriticWritten almost exclusively in taut dialogue, the book already reads like a screenplay, and the Coen brothers have taken full advantage.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Like a pair of owlish mind readers, the Coen brothers have somehow done exactly the right thing to repuff their sagging artistic momentum.
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| Original Score: 5/5
A stark modern-day Western featuring Javier Bardem as the creepiest movie psycho this side of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.
The most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem.
No Country delivers, with suspense scenes as taut as they are acutely observed.
The Coens' typically superior filmmaking sustains the electrifying mood for most of the picture, but they are undone by being too faithful to the source novel by Cormac McCarthy.
A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor.
