50 Top 10 Lists of 2007

Top 10 Movies (Richard Schickel)

#2. No Country for Old Men

Guy (Josh Brolin) comes across a huge stash of cash and a lot of dead bodies in West Texas, decides to make off with the loot, reckons with the implacably murderous psychopathy of one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who's in the employ of the injured parties. Tommy Lee Jones plays the dust-dry local sheriff, trying to assert reason in an entirely unreasonable situation. The Coen brothers movie, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel, returns them to their best emotional territory of Fargo and Miller's Crossing, a place where comic innocence and unmediated violence explosively coexist. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, but you cannot avert your eyes from the resulting chaos.

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