The Academy Award winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's violent, poetic and darkly funny crime novel No Country For Old Men sees The Coen Brothers produce their finest thriller to date. Set amongst the wild, empty, and imposing landscape of 1980s Texas, No Country For Old Men is a masterly tale of the good, the deranged, and the outright doomed.

Approaching retirement, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is one of the last links to the history of Texas' Old West and the men who patrolled the frontiers of decency and lawlessness. These days, though, he feels less and less able to comprehend the new breed of violent criminals that have drifted into his jurisdiction. Violent men like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem): an enigmatic, psychopathic, and obsessively compulsive killer who determines the fate of his victims with a quick flip of a coin. Chigurh, an ex-special-forces operative turned hit man, has been hired to track down two million dollars in cash taken from the scene of a drug-deal gone awry and whoever spirited it away. That man is Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin): a financially struggling hardened Vietnam veteran who stumbled upon the money and a substantial amount of heroin amongst a sea of bloody corpses and a bullet-strewn truck whilst hunting antelope in the desert near the Mexican border.

McCarthy's melancholic and muscular prose is a perfect match for the Coen brothers' unique brand of poker-faced irony. The narrative ellipses entwine with the Coens' modern noir nonchalance and dark humour to highlight and explore the similarities and differences of Moss, Chigurh, and Bell as they try to track one another down. With dark intelligence and an unstoppable array of sly wit, No Country For Old Men is reminiscent of Joel and Ethan Coen's early neo-noir motion picture Blood Simple and their much-lauded Academy Award winning Fargo and is a cat-and-mouse chase epic that engages and excites from beginning to end.