No Country for Old Men - The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbled upon a massacre while hunting one day. A series of trucks are riddled with bullets and dead bodies are strewn about. One of the trucks is loaded with heroin. Not far from the scene, Llewelyn tracks a trail of footsteps and finds one final body, who has a suitcase full of money. As movies have taught us, like A Simple Plan (made by Coen Brothers friend Sam Raimi), finding a suitcase full of money never ends well. No Country for Old Men is no exception.

Soon, Llewelyn is being tracked down by psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who has nothing close to a conscience and nothing resembling a human soul. He has one objective, to find the money and return it to its owners, and will stop at nothing to get it. The whereabouts of Llewelyn, along with the dead bodies that are appearing wherever he goes, is being investigated by old-timer Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. He waxes nostalgic for the “good old days” of law enforcement, remembering others in his position who never even had to pull a gun in their days of service.

On its surface, No Country for Old Men is a movie with the classic message, “greed doesn’t pay.” It's also an examination of the most terrifying kind of evil, one that's human. But it’s so much more than that. I still remember watching No Country in the theater, for the first time, when it was still in its initial limited release and how awe-struck I was with it. The film, like the novel it’s based on, is about violence. It’s about the never-ending cycle of violence and how, as we age, we determine that the world is going to hell in a handbasket before our very eyes. Everything feels worse. Nothing, we believe, has ever been as bad as it is now.

Every generation has always believed that, since the dawn of time. “Damn kids,” has been a mantra of the old for as long as history has been documented. So when a mass murdering psychopath like Anton Chigurh shows up, who actively enjoys creating misery and grins when witnessing the chaos he’s wrought, how do we reason this to ourselves? It’s not easy to digest that people like Chigurh are just a part of the human condition. We have to believe that their existence is signaling the very end of days. It's how we cope. One day, we’ll be dead, and the young folks today will be old, and they’ll be shaking their heads in a depression, thinking about how awful things are, and how things have never been so terrible in all of history. This cycle will continue for as long as the human species exists.

No Country for Old Men could easily have been made as a cynical picture, about how awful life is and how awful it’s always been. Instead, the Coens mine Cormac McCarthy’s novel for his glimmers of hope in the most hopeless of situations. McCarthy, the macabre soul that he was, wasn’t the hopeless cynic his reputation would lead you to believe. He was too complicated for easy categorization.

2007 was a hell of a year for movies. In most any other year, when it swept the Oscars and took home Best Picture, it would have been no contest, an easy decision. But that year, the reaction was split between it and another masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. In the years that have followed, both films have aged like a fine wine, feeling like products of another era. These are tough, novel-like narratives that convey information subtlety, with heavy themes of death, murder, and greed, that somehow connect with mainstream audiences and critics alike.

It's impressive how much of the film is told visually, and without dialogue, for a work that's adapted from a novel, a format that relies solely on the written word to convey information. Instead of having information spelled out for the audience, the Coens instead prefer to let action play out and tell the story. The way Moss, Chigurh, and Sheriff Bell react under pressure, or to witnessing violence, says more about them than any forced exposition ever could. The Coen Brothers have made more amazing films that I can keep track of. They’re natural-born storytellers. And it’s to No Country for Old Men’s credit that out of a mountain of great films, No Country easily ranks as one of their best.

Vital Disc Stats: The Ultra HD Blu-ray
No Country for Old Men comes to 4K UHD and Blu-ray in a two-disc release from the Criterion Collection in a standard case. The case contains new artwork commissioned for this release by Juan Esteban R., along with a booklet containing writing from Francine Prose and Larry McMurty.

No Country for Old Men has a very specific color palette that feels like the setting sun in the desert, with lots of golds, yellows, browns, and purples. Even the blood that flows looks dark, nearly black, and arterial. This new 4K transfer, approved by director of photography Roger Deakins (one of the all-time greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived), was graded in Dolby Vision HDR. No Country has always looked good, but this release is the best it’s ever looked. The previous Blu-ray looked damn good, but Criterion’s new transfer and HDR application show massive improvements over its previous release. Skin colors are deep and lines on faces are clear and sharply detailed. The occasional color outside of the meticulous color palette, like the red of a shotgun shell being racked before a tense encounter, pop on the screen.

The previous Blu-ray had an LPCM 5.1 sound mix that I always thought was a total mess. Loud sound effects were way too loud, the dialog was muddy and the bass was completely out of control. It was show-offy in all the wrong ways. The DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround sound mix on this release is a major improvement. It sounds roughly like its predecessor’s mix, in that the same effects ping the same speakers, but it’s mixed with more care and consideration. Dialogue comes through clearly without issue. Gunshots will pack a punch and explode without blowing out your speakers. And explosions and rumbling pickup trucks will growl from your subwoofer without sounding obnoxiously overpowered. Ambient sound is very important to this mix, so surround sound speakers see a near-constant activity level with blowing wind, chirping birds, echoes from gunshots, etc. It sounds like the engineers over at Criterion basically took the existing sound mix from its previous release and fixed some leveling issues.

No Country for Old Men sees a lot of new features to peruse, which alone would justify the decision to upgrade any previous releases you might own. All special features will be found on the Blu-ray disc.

• Joel and Ethan Coen with Megan Abbott (HD 40:27)
• Roger Deakins and David Diliberto (HD 33:45)
• Interviews With the Cast (HD 24:53)
• An Incredibly Unauthorized Documentary (SD 9:19)
• The Making of No Country for Old Men (SD 24:29)
• Working with the Coens (SD 8:09)
• Diary of a Country Sheriff (SD 6:45)
• Trailer

No Country for Old Men is another wonderful entry into the Criterion Collection. Loaded with a ton of new special features, a breathtaking new 4K transfer with Dolby Vision HDR grading, and fixing audio issues from previous releases, making the decision to purchase this is a no-brainer… even if you didn’t find a stash of money. Whether this is a first-time purchase or you’re upgrading your previous purchase in your home media library, No Country for Old Men is Highly Recommended.