No Country for Old Men (the Coen brothers, 2007)

Here, the Coens return to their knitting, after losing their way with remakes and genre imitations in The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, and it's a huge relief, even if the fallback position is just a Peckinpah-soaked cascade of bloody misfortunes heaped on top of each other. Josh Brolin witnesses something he shouldn't have and gets Javier Bardem as a terminator on his tail. Tommy Lee Jones crops up occasionally as a weary sheriff who's always a step behind, tacked on to the events as he is to the text.
We're in the Coen brothers' netherworld of Gothic western again, more or less the feel of Blood Simple 20 years on, far from the warmth of Fargo or the pathos of Arriaga's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, in which Tommy Lee Jones occupied a similar role, and which resonates through the Coens' take on the same landscape. But here, ultimately, it's no country for anyone, not even Bardem's icily terrifying destroyer.
It's hardly their best work, in that it's hopelessly nihilistic, and therefore lacks a real point. But few films of recent years take you to that concluding realisation with such panache.

7/10