Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal:

The villain in “No Country for Old Men,” a psychopath named Chigurh who is played to demonic perfection by Javier Bardem, uses a coin toss to decide a potential victim’s fate. I’m not advocating the same approach to seeing Joel and Ethan Coen’s spectacular new thriller, only noting both sides of its coin — uncommon cinematic artistry, along with some of the most horrifically violent moments ever put on screen. If watching movie violence is cathartic, then this film amounts to heavy therapy. It’s much more than that, however. This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski,” maybe the best they’ve done, period. My admiration is tempered only by my apparently incurable resistance to the very qualities that draw others to the Coens’ work — the stylization I find self-preening, the philosophizing that seems sententious.