Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, the Coen Brothers have made three films – Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, and No Country For Old Men. All of them have been departures from their pre-9/11 pictures in that they're not based completely on their own ideas. Intolerable Cruelty, their first romantic comedy, was co-written with Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone. The Ladykillers was a remake of an Alec Guinness film of the same name, and No Country For Old Men is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel.

The first two I would rate as the brothers' worst and second worst films in their impressive canon. As they are based in New York City I had often wondered if the attacks didn't somehow affect their work. It seemed to me that perhaps seeing such horror at such proximity hindered their creativity and they were now coasting along on easier projects.

With No Country For Old Men I wonder no more. Easily their best work since O Brother, Where Art Thou? and possibly their best ever, No Country is a wonder to behold. It is a complicated and complex work and I'm not even sure I understood it all, but I loved every moment of it.

The film opens with long shots of the Texas plains. The camera moves languidly about and I could feel the Texas heat, smell the Texas dust, and get lost in the Texas wilderness. Roger Deakins again proves his status as a master of the camera, as it is brilliantly shot.

The Coens often make great use of setting and location as a full character in their films, and here it is no different. Like the white blankets of snow in Fargo, and moist greens of Depression-era Mississippi in O Brother, the great plains of Texas are an intricate part of No Country.

As the camera looms around the barrenness of West Texas, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) reminisces off camera about the days of old. Those days were peaceful, and quiet. Sheriffs could rule with a kind word and an honest opinion. There was no need to carry weapons and violence, it seems, was banished.

With those words the camera finds a lone rifleman, hunting his game. The hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), misses his shot and soon stumbles onto another sort of hunt – a drug deal gone bad. there are bodies everywhere, a stash of heroin in the back of a truck, and a satchel of cash under a tree. It is the cash that Llewelyn desires, takes, and is ultimately his downfall as well as the catalyst for the rest of the movie.