No Country for Old Men: Review By Josh

No Country For Old Men isn't just the Coen brothers' best film since Fargo, it's actually the best film of the year.

The film follows a grimmer version of the same thematic formula that worked so well in Fargo. It shows people capable of the worst deeds, but doesn't attempt to explain those deeds. Javier Bardem is brilliantly unpredictable and creepy as he plays angel of death, executing (with a compressed air hammer no less) his own brand of twisted justice which, strangely enough, almost manages to make sense to the viewer.

The Coens' use of lighting effects, camera angles, and intentional non-use of a score creates a noir filled with authentic tension. There is dark humor, but unlike previous Coen films supporting characters are given to genuine fear and sympathy rather than played for laughs. Questions are left unanswered and events are left to chance, giving to the belief that fiction should as unpredictable as reality. Ultimately, the world that is created is regulated around its three leads, Josh Brolin, Bardem, and Tommy Lee Jones. The atmosphere is as emotionally bleak as the West Texas landscape it depicts and in a darkly poetic way draws blurred lines between past, present, and future in the sense that the dangerous internal human condition (whether it be greed or revenge, or any other given sin) always renders society equally as unsafe. Jones narrates the film with a sense of distance; at the beginning he remarks that his job requires "a piece of your soul" on the line, and by the end it we understand what that means. Our mastery of ourselves is just as unsure as our mastery of the events around us, and sometimes that piece of the soul is sacrificed in the process.