No Country for Old Men

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Dickie L Absolute cracking movie Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 09/01/25 Full Review Camilo R Great movie, great actors and performances, plus one of the best villains of all time. I expected more from the ending, and it was perfect. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 08/23/25 Full Review Diallo G To my mind, this film boasts one of the greatest villains in movie history. Usually I like complex morally ambiguous villains, like Magneto, or Al Swearengen from Deadwood, but this villain is perfectly simple. In fact, he’s not really a person at all, he’s a mythological figure: the physical incarnation of Nihilism as it manifests in chance and fate, existentialism against the backdrop of death and entropy. Hear me out! Also, if you need a refresher of the scene here's a link: https://youtu.be/opbi7d42s8E The scene where Chigurh makes the gas station clerk flip a coin for his life perfectly demonstrates what he is. The clerk’s understanding of life, his desires, his fears, his designs, his excuses have all led him to push change across a counter on a random stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, exchanging meaningless pleasantries with strangers, consuming resources as he counts down the days to his death. Chigurh, a modern interpretation of the Grim Reaper, a hitman with no life or thought beyond confronting people with death, attempts to make the clerk aware of the moment, of the meaning of his idle words and the meaninglessness with which he is using them, of the absurdity of his stunted aspirations; and he infuses the coin with meaning by hanging the man’s life on the result. He tells the man he stands to gain “everything” from the bet (meaning life and all the potential it encompasses), and after the clerk wins the toss, he tells him not to lose track of the coin that saved his life by mixing it in with the other meaningless coins, this coin that spared his life, and could have spelled his death. “If you put it back in with the other quarters it will become just another coin. Which it is.” In other words, Chigurh recognizes that the meaning of the coin has been fabricated by the life or death situation he created; but to him, everything is like that, life is that. To Chigurh, the clerk himself is a meaningless object, in spite of the fact that he creates meaning, his life a patchwork of fabricated, and in his case, pointlessly mundane stories. But according to Chigurh’s view, even if the clerk had created a better life, a grander story, it all amounts to nothing anyway because it’s all subject to the whims of fate, and it all gets erased in the end by the void of death. As a child, I was attracted to the stories of the ancient Greek gods, but disturbed by their pettiness, and by the gross injustice that prevailed. I wanted, expected the happy American ending where people get what they deserve, and the world bends to the laws of reason and morality. Now, seeing the arc of progress fishtailing on the black ice of our irrational instincts, I see why those myths were compelling enough to be passed down through many cultures over two and a half thousand years to be read by the homeless kids I work with. Fate, chance, absurdity, death—these forces are eternal and inescapable. The sheriff in this film, BTW, represents the rational, moral force in humanity. He cannot understand the villain but is haunted by him nonetheless because even though his life is anchored by a worldview of goodness and order, that life and the world it belongs to are coming to an end and, in the villains random killing spree, he glimpses entropy, the dissolution not just of his life, but of his code, and his understanding of the world. As the forces of ignorance and totalitarianism rise, as AI dissolves our common sense of reality beneath our feet (or before our eyes, more like), as the climate spirals, and the techno-feudalism bros launch their coup, I’m feeling the title of this film more deeply than I did when it first came out: this is no country for old men. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 08/17/25 Full Review Isa B SPOILER ALERT I have many thoughts and mixed feelings about No Country For Old Men. On one hand, it possesses many elements of greatness. On the other, it suffers somewhat from its unbalanced, yet very realistic nature. In life, you don't always get answers. In that way, it is realistic. However, this film purposely deprives you of answers that I feel the audience should have. One example is in the character of Llewelyn Moss. The story builds with this guy as potentially the main character. We see a lot of the story unfolding through his perspective. Then, all of a sudden, he has been murdered and we now see this film through the eyes of the sherif. We see a dead body floating in a motel pool, and then we see Llewelyn's wife begin to cry in the next scene. So we can deduce that he has been killed. We see the sherif looking at a dead body on a slab in a wide angle shot, which does not clearly show who the deceased is. Again, we deduce that it's Llewelyn. Why keep us so far on the outside of this now? Woody Harrelson's character, Carson Wells, is another one who seems like he is in line to play a major part in the film. Well, no such luck as he is promptly killed in the very next scene. As far as Llewelyn's wife Carla Jean is concerned, does she suffer from Anton's murderous wrath or is she spared? I don't have an issue with that being left for us to decide. That I think is kind of cool. However, we should have seen a shock kill of Llewelyn. Or a shoot out battle. Something. All of a sudden, we are on the outside looking in, in what I consider to be one of the strangest turn of events in cinematic history. This film doesn't follow the rules of movie story telling, that's for sure. That isn't a bad thing in my opinion, though, in certain instances in this film, it just doesn't work. The ending being so open ended is not an unpardonable movie sin either. The now retired sheriff, pondering the meaning of his dreams from the previous night is an interesting enough ending, I suppose. That was one helluva jumpscare when Anton got t-boned in that intersection. Overall, No Country For Old Men is a very good film. It's most definitely unique, and original. The film is well acted all the way through. Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Kelly Macdonald were exceptional. No matter what I think about its imperfections, it most certainly keeps your attention as there is never a dull moment. I recommend this film. 89/100 Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 08/14/25 Full Review grain j Javier Bardem truly takes over, the absence of music in this film keeps you on edge not expecting what to come next. An unpredictable movie that is worth the watch Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 08/09/25 Full Review Don M Destined to be a classic. I think many people miss the simple point that it is not a good country for old people to be living in. Asian countries have more reverence for their elderly than America has. I took care of my dad who lived all alone, he was old, and we live in Texas and many times in the news I would see a local news story on how an elderly man living alone was murdered and robbed. So I would stay with my dad. This movie wasn't about anyone else except Tommy Lee Jones character in the movie, the sheriff, and that he is old in a country where violence and crime in general is just so inexplicable to someone of an older generation they don`t know what to think. There is so much more to this movie, on all the characters in it but I just thought id post on this aspect of the movie alone. As the movie didn't seem to make any sense to many people. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 08/07/25 Full Review Read all reviews

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