No Country for Old Men (Criterion Collection)

‘No Country For Old Men' is the first Best Picture-winning film I saw in the movie theater and the first Cormac McCarthy novel I read. It's dark, it's bloody, and it's unapologetic. I recall being a tad upset by the abrupt ending and the fact that the villain wins in the end, but I've come to accept that that is just how it goes sometimes. If there is one thing that viewers of the film can agree on is that Javier Bardem's character, Anton Chigurh, is the main attraction. He is a once in a blue moon villain. He may seem one-dimensional with no history or future to speak of. He's just a killing machine. He's pure evil with a moral-less compass that spins in unpredictable directions. I've even once read that an FBI profiler once described him as cinema's most realistic psychopathic killer. He's even been compared to real-life monsters, such as Israel Keyes. ‘No Country For Old Men' is not a character study, though. It's a new breed of Western/thriller that has a plot involving two million dollars worth of drug money in the 1980s and the unfortunate characters who are touched by or in the periphery of a drug deal gone wrong. Just like in the Cohen brothers' ‘Fargo', the theme of greed rears its ugly head. However it is the inclusion of a rare and unstoppable character like Anton Chigurh that turns the plot on its head. He is always in control of everything that happens in the movie, and he always gets his way, and his way is always crazy and horrifying. The coin he occasionally tosses when deciding the fate of potential victims really does have no say. It's just HIM. He is always running the show.

amazing movie and picture quality