I liked O Brother, Where Art Thou and Fargo. I liked Blood Meridian and The Road.

No Country for Old Men is the logical perfection of the mating of these two creative forces.

Take a plot and purpose set down by Cormac McCarthy that settles at nothing less than a metered, long-considered comment on the nature of the evil that men do.

Combine this with a piece of cinema so hard, stark, beautiful, malevolent that it seems to have been dredged straight from the deepest nightmare realms of the human unconscious.

You get this film.

Its ultimate message, exgtracted from the "god" character (the old lawman TL Jones visits near the end of the flick who lives with a bunch of cats):

Evil is real, it has been here a long time and it will not go away, you should not give up hope, the only true way to combat evil is to free yourself from the idea of deserving anything, the weight of the world does not rest entirely on the shoulders of one man, and god will be there at the end.

Now of course none of this is especially novel, but what is novel is the way that this movie, and McCarthy's work in general, makes these revelations so potent, so forceful that the world is boiled down and stripped away and suddenly you see a reality in which those precepts aforementioned are the only precepts with any relevance left in them.