As you have probably read from more than one source, 2007 is widely considered to be a singularly great year for film. I, for one, agree. Last year saw great films by several great directors (David Fincher, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg...), and even gave me new favorite movies by two of my favorite directors, potentially making their way into my top ten movies of all time. One of those movies is PT Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the other is Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, a film with an already insane amount of hype (and four Oscars) I am about to attempt to fuel even more.

With a range of influences seemingly as broad and far reaching as the hard-boiled crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, No Country for Old Men is perhaps best described as a Hitchcockian western-noir. While the Coens' best work (Miller's Crossing, Fargo, Blood Simple) has always walked this line, the balance has usually tipped toward noir. No Country for Old Men, however, is more of a western than anything else. Revolving around the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad, its premise is quintessentially Coen, yet unlike anything they have ever done before. Joel and Ethan have changed very little of Cormac McCarthy's excellent novel, and the subtle changes they have made to align it more to their style are all for the best. The film's vast, scorched West Texas landscape brings to mind the emptiness of Fargo's icy Midwestern locales, but Roger Deakins' cinematography has managed to make this feel even more sinister. The setting feels very much like hell itself, and offers the perfect backdrop for the primitive chaos to unfold.

No Country for Old Men is far and away the Coen Brothers' most shocking movie yet, and also their most political. At the risk of sounding pretentious, West Texas serves as a contemporary frontier, and McCarthy and the Coens seem to be making a statement about the American dream. The country has always prospered at the expense of others, and our history has never been pretty. While No Country for Old Men is certainly not the first film to debunk the sanitized American myth of a manifest destiny, it does so on a previously uncharted, intimately personal level that makes it that much more effective.

Further cementing No Country for Old Men's brilliance is its impeccable cast. Much has already been said Javier Bardem's turn as the terrifying Anton Chigurgh, so all I'll say is yes, it does live up to the hype, and he does deserve his Oscar. Bardem instills the film with a sense of gravity previously absent from every Coen film, creating the most memorable villain in a very long time. Tommy Lee Jones gives pretty much what you would expect as the grizzled, world-weary Sheriff Ed-Tom Bell, more or less perfecting the kind of character he does best. Josh Brolin and Kelly McDonald as Llewellyn and Carla-Jean Moss, are both incredible. Brolin provides Moss with a kind of everyman appeal and desperation that makes him entirely sympathetic, furthering the idea that the film is about good guys getting screwed over by the American dream. McDonald (who you will not believe is Scottish) plays Carla-Jean with a soul-crushingly childish sense of innocence and simplicity. She is perhaps the most heart-breaking character in the movie, and while she never felt like a major player in the book, McDonald uses her limited screen time to transform Carla-Jean into an unforgettable presence.

Unfortunately, the special features on the DVD do not live up to the film. There are only three more or less repetitive featurettes, all of which are conspicuously absent. If all was right in the world No Country for Old Men would get a Criterion-quality release, but it isn't, so it didn't. This is all alright, though, because the movie itself is special enough.

In case you haven't picked up on it already, No Country for Old Men is an incredible film. It is the work of masters of the medium at the height of their powers, and only gets better with subsequent viewings. Despite the package's lack of special features, this DVD is still utterly essential to any collection.