The Coen Brothers are back. After a couple of missteps with the uneven, oftentimes flat remake of The Ladykillers, and the under-appreciated romantic satire Intolerable Cruelty, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up a bleak, unforgiving contemporary American western with No Country for Old Men, which is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel.

This is the Coen Brothers at their best, and their most bone-dry film yet. Similar in tone to the Minnesota Gothic of Fargo, and just as violent (or maybe more) than their 1920s gangster drama Miller's Crossing, with philosophical insight similar to Barton Fink, the slapstick escapades of such films as Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? have been replaced by reveries on the great American old west.

Tommy Lee Jones stars as a taciturn, weary sheriff, a proud wearer of the badge from a long line of lawmen. But in 1980 west Texas, times have changed. Things have become too brutal. His eyes can barely stand the sight of a drug deal gone bad, out in the desert, where a dozen or so bodies are spread out among some shot-up trucks.

At the scene, his dumb deputy exclaims: "It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?"

"If it ain't, it'll do until the mess gets here," says the sad-eyed Sheriff Ed Tom.

Before the sheriff and his deputy rode up on the scene, it had been visited by Llwellen Moss, a local good-ol-boy who had been out hunting for deer. While following the blood trail of a buck he'd shot, he finds another blood trail, thicker, deeper red, which leads to the crime scene, and, eventually, a satchel containing $2 million.

Moss is played by Josh Brolin, who with his magnificent moustache, gives a riveting performance as the laconic Vietnam veteran who knows that keeping money is almost the dumbest thing he'll ever do in his life. But going back to the crime scene, ostensibly to offer a survivor some water, is the dumbest.

On Moss's trail is the biggest, most bad-ass villain ever committed to film. Forget about Darth Vader. Forget about the Wicked Witch of the West. Forget about the shark from Jaws, the Alien, the Terminator or any of the laughable Bond arch-enemies. There is a new bad guy in town and his name is Chigurh. Anton Chigurh. With a crazy helmet of hair, he is played with delightful glee by Javier Bardem. For killing, he favors a compressed-air bolt that is used for dispatching cattle in the slaughterhouse. No need to waste a bullet, or leave any evidence behind. Quick and clean. But if anything, he's polite. "Will you stand still, please," he asks the driver of a car he's about to steal.

Chigurh is wickedly determined to get the money back. He lives by a code, however messed up it may be. No one can ever see him. And when he says he is going to kill someone, well, that's just what he does. Though he does have his good days, like in one hilarious scene where he asks one of the Coens' patented hayseed gas station attendants to "call it" on a coin flip. The right guess means the man can live.

Woody Harrelson has a small, but memorable role as another man trying to retrieve the money. He's all too familiar with Chiguhr.

Asks the man who hires Woody (played by Coens' regular Stephen Root): "Just how dangerous is he?"

"Compared to what? The bubonic plague?"

Kelly MacDonald trades in her Glaswegian brogue for Texas twang as Llewellan Moss's helpless wife, and gives spark to her character, who's struggling to come to grips with what her husband's done.

Despite all the blood, No Country for Old Men is beautiful and profound, an ode to the old American west, and an exasperated look at the senseless greed and violence that has gripped our world.

No Country for Old Men opens in Bangkok cinemas on February 20, 2008. It is reportedly NOT censored.