
No Country for Old Men
The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.

The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.

Marge Gunderson is the warmest character the Coens ever wrote, and the reason this one lasts: a kidnapping goes wrong in the snow and she is the only calm person in it.

It underwhelmed in cinemas and then grew a festival, a religion and a vocabulary: the Coens built a Chandler plot around a man whose only ambition is getting his rug replaced.

The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.

The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.

The Coens went back to Charles Portis's actual sentences and rationed contractions almost out of existence: a fourteen-year-old girl hires a drunk marshal to avenge her father.

The Coens wrote it in the voice of a 1930s crime novel and never break character once: a hat blowing through woods is the famous image, and nobody explains it.

The Coens' funniest film and by some way their fastest: a childless couple steal one of a furniture magnate's quintuplets, and the chase never once slows down afterward.

Homer's Odyssey rerouted through Depression-era Mississippi: the soundtrack of gospel and bluegrass sold eight million copies and sent a mass audience back to music first recorded in the 1920s.