Saturday May 17          No Country For Old Men          USA 2007

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald     122 minutes, cert 15

The Coen brothers have surpassed their usual high standards with this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, and what is arguably their masterpiece. Set in Texas, 1980, No Country for Old Men is the tale of a marginal drifter and opportunist (Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss) who stumbles across a grizzly crime scene, and makes off with a suitcase full of cash. He is pursued by Javier Bardem’s terrifying Anton Chigurh, remorseless assasin and amoral psychopath, and the local sheriff played by the ever wonderful Tommy Lee Jones.

Using what is essentially a simple plot device – man takes loot belonging to someone else...someone else hires gun to retrieve cash – the Coen brothers have constructed a bloody and brutal thriller, with what many critics have described as suspense to rival Hitchcock at his best, and with their characteristic pitch black humour.

But No Country is also a poetic lament, an elegiac contemplation of the erosion of old moral certainties, articulated through the world weary figure of Jones’ sheriff. He is a man who has seen a lot of crime, and spent a lifetime in the pursuit of justice, but who is now simply bemused and saddened by society’s capacity for relentless brutality, apparently for its own sake. The sadness at the heart of the film is set against the vast blank canvas of the bleak Texan landscape, beautifully rendered by Roger Deakin’s magnificent cinematography.  Fantastic. Don’t miss it.

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