Review: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men
Dir: Joel & Ethan Coen
Star: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson
E&L Rating: 9/10

The signs were always good for me on this film. Cormac McCarthy has been rightly labelled as the finest American writer of his generation, a genuine heir to Hemingway in his exploration of the human psyche through violence, companionship and hardship. No Country For Old Men is one of his most straightforwardly enjoyable works, a fairly linear thriller, recounting through the eyes of an involved party. It certainly contains far more in the way of visceral thrills than The Road, his more celebrated work of post-apocolyptic, dystopian bleakness and existential disharmony. My adoration for his prose is all conquering and while the previous modern adaptation of his work, All The Pretty Horses, was a startling disappointment, this boded well.