No Country for Old Men

A welder stumbles onto the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas scrubland — bodies, heroin, and two million dollars in cash — and makes the decision to take the money. The Coen brothers adapt Cormac McCarthy's novel as a pursuit film that steadily evacuates the conventions of the genre: there is no showdown in the expected shape, no sheriff who closes the distance in time. Javier Bardem's Chigurh operates less like a villain than like a force the film refuses to explain away, and Tommy Lee Jones's aging lawman narrates from a position of permanent arrival-too-late. The structure belongs to the Western; the logic underneath does not.