Academy Award for Best Picture

2007

No Country for Old Men

Release dates

November 9, 2007

Starring

Tommy Lee Jones

Javier Bardem

Josh Brolin

No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American neo-Western thriller directed, written, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin and tells the story of an ordinary man to whom chance delivers a fortune that is not his, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as the paths of three men intertwine in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. Themes of fate, conscience and circumstance re-emerge that the Coen brothers have previously explored in Blood Simple and Fargo.

The film premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. Among its four 2007 Academy Awards were Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, allowing the Coen brothers to join five previous directors honored three times for a single film. In addition, the film won three British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) including Best Director, and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year, and the National Board of Review selected the film as the best of 2007.

No Country for Old Men appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was regarded by many critics as the Coen brothers' finest film to date. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers...have ever made," The Guardian journalist John Patterson said "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors," and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and is "as entertaining as hell."