Last week I saw the new Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men.  This morning it earned a number of Golden Globe nominations, likely to be followed by a few Oscar noms.

It’s now taken me a week to write any sort of review  It’s the kind of movie that I kind of want to forget, but just can’t get out of my head.  No Country was a difficult movie–made so by the ruthless storyline combined with great actors and pitch-perfect directing.  The Coen brothers always write fascinating dialogue, and I don’t know if I ever seen a movie where silence was used more effectively.

One of the criteria for judging any good drama is whether it has anything new or interesting to say.  No Country certainly has that.  In its own exquisitely painful way it deals with questions of greed, aging, death and what legal philosopher-types would call moral agency.  I’m just having trouble deciding if I liked the answers.