No Country For Old Men.

No Country for Old Men tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas.

The film has been highly praised by critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers…have ever made." A Guardian journalist said the film proved "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors."

Over wide shots of desolate, expansive West Texas country in June 1980, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) narrates his belief that the times are changing and that the area is becoming increasingly violent. As Bell's narration concludes, the film's antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), is arrested and taken into custody by a sheriff's deputy. The deputy scarcely has time to describe Chigurh's unique captive bolt pistol weapon to authorities before Chigurh's handcuffs are wrapped around the deputy's neck -- strangling him to death, and allowing Chigurh's escape.

Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is hunting pronghorn antelope near the Rio Grande when he stumbles upon a collection of corpses and a lone dying man: the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry. In addition to a shipment of heroin, Moss finds two million dollars in a satchel, which he keeps, leaving the lone survivor to die. Later that night in bed with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), Moss's conscience pushes him to return to the site with water for the dying man, which eventually triggers a cat-and-mouse between a gang of Mexicans, Moss, Chigurh, and Bell as they chase the money and each other across the West Texas and Mexico landscapes.
Chigurh, a professional hitman, has been hired to retrieve the satchel of money by using a radio receiver which corresponds to a small transponder hidden in the satchel. Chigurh does not hesitate to kill those in his way, including those closely associated with the drug deal, the drivers of cars he steals for transport, and people he encounters by chance. Moss, unaware of the transponder's existence, sends his wife Carla Jean out of town, and moves from motel to motel as he attempts to elude both the Mexicans and Chigurh. In the meantime, Bell avoids the federal authorities’ investigation of the original drug-related massacre and focuses his attention on trying to locate and protect Moss. Chigurh, with his tracking device, inexorably closes in on Moss while acting as an agent of fate and chance to the people he meets along the way.

While tracking the money, Chigurh guns down several Mexican gang-members and a rival hitman, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson). Moss, realizing Chigurh will find Carla Jean and kill her, arranges a rendezvous with her in El Paso to give her the money and send her out of harm’s way. The characters all converge on a seedy hotel in El Paso, but not simultaneously: Bell, Carla Jean, and Chigurh do not arrive until after Moss has been killed by the remaining Mexicans in a shootout.

Sheriff Bell returns that night to the motel crime scene and finds that the lock to Moss's hotel room door has been blown out in a fashion similar to that of Moss's trailer, indicating the presence of Chigurh and his captive-bolt pistol. Chigurh, on the other side of the door, observes Bell through a reflection in the lock hole as Bell stands outside the door. Bell, after hesitating, opens the door and enters. Once inside the room, Bell sees that the vent cover has been removed by someone using a dime as a screwdriver, suggesting that the satchel of money has been removed. Bell sits for a while in the darkened room, looking at the shadows, but leaves without encountering Chigurh.

Some time later Bell visits his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), an ex-lawman. Bell is planning to retire due to his weariness of the changing times, but Ellis points out that the region has always been violent, and accuses Bell of "vanity" in thinking that he could change the condition of the world. Chigurh, in the meantime, has located the widowed Carla Jean and waits for her at her deceased mother's home. Despite telling her that he "gave [Moss] his word" that she would die should Moss not hand over the money, Chigurh reconsiders and offers Carla Jean the same "coin flip" opportunity for her life that he had offered earlier to an innocent bystander in his path. Unlike the previous party, Carla Jean refuses to call heads or tails. The perspective cuts to the house's exterior, and Chigurh is seen leaving, carefully checking the soles of his boots. As Chigurh drives away he is involved in a car accident in which his left arm is badly broken, but he manages to leave the scene before the police arrive.

As Bell sits at home reflecting on his life choices, he relates to his wife (Tess Harper) two dreams he had, both involving his deceased father, also a lawman. Bell reveals briefly that in the first dream, he lost "some money" that his father had given him. Bell says that in the second dream, he and his father were riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. His father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed by Bell with his head down. Bell then relates that his father was "going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire" in the surrounding dark and cold, and that when Bell got there, his father would be waiting. Bell closes the dream narrative, and the film, with the final words: "And then I woke up."

Themes and style.
Not only is the film a faithful adaptation of McCarthy's 2005 novel, it revisits themes Ethan and Joel Coen have used in Blood Simple and Fargo. The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coens, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate [and] circumstance" in those earlier works. Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping, but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy’s novel."

In The Village Voice, Scott Foundas writes that "Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward... In the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction." Roger Ebert writes that "the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice."

New York Times critic A.O. Scott points out that Chigurh, Moss, and Bell each "occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined."

Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's modus operandi:

“Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise ... if everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. 'You don't have to do this,' the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor.

Courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Country_for_Old_Men_(film)