No Country for Old Men

This is probably the purest genre exercise to win Best Picture since The Silence of the Lambs. It’s all tension, quietly assembled and ready to break out into violence at any moment. This is a masterful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy by Joel and Ethan Coen, finding the little slices of black, deadpan, and offbeat comedy here and there, but mostly this is a dead stare of a threat against the audience’s nerves. Told precisely both from a screenplay point of view as well as visually, No Country ...