What's it about? Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name by the Coen brothers, No Country For Old Men stars Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a man who stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. Taking $2 million in cash, he finds himself being tracked down by a psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) intent on recovering the money. How does it end? Moss is killed in a showdown audiences don't get to see - instead, the film cuts ahead to the aftermath, as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives and discovers the body. The closing moments see Bell sharing strange dreams with his wife as they sit at the kitchen table. Why was it controversial? Denying audiences the climactic shoot-out between Moss and his antagonists annoyed more than a few people who perhaps focused too intently on the plot and therefore considered it a non-ending. To them, the set-up hadn't been followed by the conventional pay-off. Yet the Coen brothers are no strangers to deliberately subverting genre conventions, and for some the end revealed that the real focus is on Bell's understanding of his place in the world (clearly implied in the title) rather than the cat-and-mouse chase between Moss and Chigurh.
