Few streaming services hide as many of their riches as much as Amazon Prime Video does. The streaming service has plenty of great movies for you to peruse, but figuring out which movies are on the service and deciding which ones to prioritize can be a challenge.
Sometimes, the best ways to decide which movie to check out next is to figure out which movies won’t be available on the service for long. That’s why we’re recommending you check out No Country for Old Men on the streamer before it lives Prime Video at the end of September. The movie, which was adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, tells the story of a hunter who stumbles upon a bag of cash and winds up on the run after a hit man and the police begin chasing after him. Here are three reasons you should check it out.
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It’s one of the Coen brothers’ best movies
The Coen brothers are one of the most prolific directing duos in the history of movies, and No Country for Old Men is their only movie to take home best picture. The film, which was shot largely in the desert, is beautiful to look at, and it also features one of the best scripts of the Coens’ entire career.
By subverting expectations at every turn and constantly turning toward the philosophical questions undergirding the movie’s thriller plot, No Country for Old Men feels like the ideal movie. It’s both serious and fun, grim and entertaining, and profound precisely because of the conventions it’s playing with.
All three of its central performances deliver career-best work
The entire cast of No Country for Old Men is incredible, but that’s especially true of Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Javier Bardem. Brolin is the perfect everyman, a smart guy who finds himself too tempted by the money he finds to leave it alone. Jones plays the sheriff tracking him down, a man so exhausted by the world that nothing, not even the most heinous crimes, can surprise him.
And Bardem, who won an Oscar for his performance, knows exactly how to embody the sociopathy of his hit man character, who sees the world as entirely random and his own actions as fundamentally meaningless.
The ending will leave you with a pit in your stomach
Few movies leave viewers with the kind of gut punch that No Country for Old Men delivers in its final moments. While some movies can surprise you in the way their plots unfold, this movie ends with a meditation on the nature of good and evil, and whether the good lives that we dream for ourselves are ever really achievable.
It all plays out on Jones’ face, and the Coens know exactly how to leave us feeling stuck in the middle, unsure whether we’ll ever really get the resolution we seek.
No Country for Old Men is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.