In West Texas, June 1980, a drug deal has just gone very badly wrong. A case containing two million dollars ends up in the hands of Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) when he comes across the aftermath. He soon finds himself being chased not only by the Mexican drug dealers, but by shadowy psychopath Anton Chigurh (Bardem), who is not afraid to leave a trail of bodies behind while chasing the money. Following all this is Sheriff Bell (Jones), trying to save Moss from his one bad decision.

The Coen brothers have produced some marvellous films over the years: Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Miller's Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy. But No Country is without question their finest work to date, and already one of the classics of cinema. The film is intensely visual, relying on the sweeping panoramas of desolate West Texas to tell part of the story. The dialogue is generally sparse, and much of the plot is told through the screen rather than the soundtrack. The acting is superb, with Javier Bardem's chilling psychopath and Tommy Lee Jones's desperate laconicism the standout performances. But Woody Harrelson turns in a great supporting role, and Kelly Macdonald (as Moss's wife) has a great scene towards the very end of the film. Inevitably this film will attract comparison with Fargo, with its own case full of money, but this is a far deeper, more downbeat piece than Fargo. And it is ultimately a (slightly) better film than the Coens' previous masterwork.

Mike Hammer was the hardest-boiled private eye of them all ((ndash)) the star of a series of blockbuster pulp novels written by Mickey Spillane between 1947 and 1996. He didn't just lean a little heavily on the odd crook's stooge the way his predecessors did: he crunched bones and punched stomachs with righteous relish; and readers ((ndash)) particularly American readers ((ndash)) loved it.

Not so A.I. Bezzerides, author of the screenplay, whose contempt for the material he was adapting is obvious (especially to Spillaine, who hated the result). With only a little tweaking here and there, making Hammer's face-slapping sadism only a shade more obvious, and his sense of self-importance only the teensiest bit more empty, the hero becomes an anti-hero we watch with fascination but are allowed ((ndash)) perhaps invited ((ndash)) to dislike.

Hammer (Meeker) meets a beaten-up young woman on a highway one night; she's been tortured for information regarding a mysterious suitcase. (The mysterious suitcase was probably the inspiration for the suitcase in Pulp Fiction (1994): in both films, the suitcase drives the action, it emits an unearthly glow when opened, and we neither see nor are explicitly told what's inside.) Hammer wants to punish the girl's torturers, but also senses big money, and from then on he sinks his teeth like a bulldog into his investigation. With mixed results.