I know it's not necessarily wise to put blind faith in reviews (it's better to triangulate them against your own taste first); but, when a film is hailed as a masterpiece by almost every review of it you read, it must be worth a look. And I enjoyed Fargo, the only other Coen brothers film that I've seen, so why not?

No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, is about a Texas welder (played by Josh Brolin) who makes off with $2 million he finds at the scene of a failed drug deal, and is pursued implacably by a criminal (Javier Bardem) so ruthless you wouldn't dare even to mock his haircut (I know that's flippant, but it's true even so), whilst Tommy Lee Jones's world-weary sheriff tries to uphold the side of law in the face of villainy he cannot comprehend.

This is a movie that reminded me, most forcefully, that film-making is still a form of art, that you can find charcterisation, metaphor, all the techniques you'd expect from literature, in the cinema as well. I was especially impressed by the movie's use of sound, and how the vast, open landscapes act as a counterpoint to the human characters. But that makes No Country for Old Men sound too much like a technical exercise, when it's a thoroughly gripping thriller.

What stops me from recommending it unreservedly is the ending: the storytelling gets more elliptical, the character you thought was the protagonist turns out not to have been, and it doesn't quite make sense on first watch. I need to see the film again, preferably after reading the book; then, I think, I'll appreciate the end more. But it doesn't get much better than seeing a movie and being able to say, 'I want to see it again'.