Misguided souls will tell you that No Country for Old Men is out for blood, focused on vengeance and unconcerned with the larger world outside a standard-issue suspense plot. Those people, of course, are deaf, dumb and blind to anything that isn't spelled out between commercials on dying TV networks. Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best. Set in 1980 in West Texas, where the chase is on for stolen drug…

There are still a lot of good movies slated for November and December, but it's hard to imagine anything topping the Coen brothers' chiller-thriller No Country for Old Men; let's just say nothing has in the first 10 months of 2007.

Story

Early on in No Country for Old Men, there is a wide-angle shot of an open field in border-town Texas. Gorgeous but menacing, it is the very snapshot of "calm before the storm." One of the men who will momentarily be in the storm's epicenter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh…