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100
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The New York Times A.O. Scott
No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it's pure heaven.
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100
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could. That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.
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100
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Many of the scenes in No Country for Old Men are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo." To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another.
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100
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.
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100
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San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.
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100
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
If watching movie violence is cathartic, then this film amounts to heavy therapy. It's much more than that, however. This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," maybe the best they've done, period.
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100
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Boston Globe Ty Burr
The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.
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91
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success.
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88
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USA Today Claudia Puig
The Coen brothers have fashioned a wry and riveting hybrid of a drama, Western, crime thriller and action film that is as powerful and thought-provoking as it is genre-bending.
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50
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Washington Post Stephen Hunter
I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.
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