The Big Lebowski came and went without ringing much change at box offices during its theatrical...

If her narrative is reliable, Mattie Ross must have been a precocious 14-year-old even before her father was shot dead by his hired hand, Tom Chaney. A pigtailed girl on the Western frontier, Mattie is as firm as an oak staff and drives hard bargains with the funeral parlor and stable in the town where her father was killed. Persistent as a river running to the sea, Mattie is determined to bring...

After winning Oscars with the unrelentingly grim No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers lighten up a little for Burn After Reading. Their new film traverses territory more familiar to the filmmakers. Here, death doesn't descend in the form of an enigmatic hit man who tosses coins for the lives he encounters.

Sometimes the Coen brothers outdo even themselves, as with last year’s No Country For Old Men, a taut, violent thriller that earned the directors a sack of Oscars, including one for Best Picture. Like their best films (Blood Simple, Fargo), No Country is essentially a traditional film noir set in an unlikely locale, in this . . .

Joel and Ethan Coen had been off-stride for several years, proffering a charmless remake of The Ladykillers and all-quirks-and-tics films such as The Man Who Wasn�t There. With No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers venture into darker territory than ever before, unrelieved by the few glimmers of humor penetrating the moral overcast. One or two lapses in logic should have been corrected and a...