True Grit (the Coen brothers, 2010)

Is this the way it's going to be with the Coens from now on, alternating original work with the scripts of others to keep up their a feature a year output? True Grit is a class apart from their hammed-up The Ladykillers remake, and indeed element-by-element superior in almost every way to the John Wayne original, not least Jeff Bridges having just a tad more control over his delivery than The Duke did, but it's still a shame to get something which is only a technical refinement and not wholly new.
That said, the virtuoso regular Coen photographer Roger Deakins gets to show how he's effectively claimed ownership of the sombre beige-wash palette for the revisionist Western since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with some images of quite remarkable tonality. The shift of emphasis away from the gruff drunkard marshal to the determined teenage girl who hires him to find her father's killer allows other characters to breathe too, including Matt Damon's sniffily precious Texas Ranger who wants in on the manhunt, and the outlaws they chase. As entertaining as the 1969 original was, it was far too much in thrall to the Wayne mythology to accommodate the complexity or elegiac darkness of this retelling.
This being a Coen film, the spot-on casting is no surprise, not least the self-assured Hailee Steinfeld as the young avenger, and the dialogue is as quickfire and ornate as usual while also fitting the Bible-encumbered culture of the 1870s frontier. It's just hard, despite all the craft, to blank out how often we've been here before, at the death of the old west.

7/10