David Denby, in the New Yorker, ruminates on the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre in general and “No Country for Old Men” in particular. It tracks cleanly the plain veneer of contempt in the pair’s films Damien Bona talks about below …

The Coens form a conspiracy of two—industrious, secretive, amused, and seemingly indifferent to both criticism and praise. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies, avoiding comments on larger meanings or anything approaching a general intellectual outlook. This strategic reticence—the avoidance of art talk—is solidly in the tradition of American movie directors’ presenting themselves solely as pragmatic entertainers. But the Coens have gone further into insouciance than any old-time director I can think of. In the opening titles for “Fargo” (1996), they announced that the movie was based on a true story, though it wasn’t. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) begins with a title stating that the movie is “based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer,” which they later claimed they had never read. From the beginning, they’ve been playing with moviemaking, playing with the audience, the press, the deep-dish interpreters, disappearing behind a façade of mockery.

… and in the end isn’t buying what the Coens are selling:

The spooky-chic way the Coens use Bardem has excited audiences with a tingling sense of the uncanny. But, in the end, the movie’s despair is unearned—it’s far too dependent on an arbitrarily manipulated plot and some very old-fashioned junk mechanics. “No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness.

Meanwhile, in New York Magazine, David Edelstein discusses the movie’s chances with Lynda Obst. He likes “No Country,” despite the fact that Ethan Coen wasn’t nice to him at a party once:

Are the Coens a Best Director lock? It would seem so. They have managed to make difficult movies without selling out or sucking up or becoming players. (I said hello to them at the recent New York Film Critics ceremony, and Ethan could barely conceal his contempt … I didn’t take it too personally. I think they’re good guys who only give a shit about critics and awards insofar as it will ensure that no one bothers them.)

He too tries to come to grips with the world view of the Coens’ work:

Speaking of no climax, no catharsis, the front-runner for Best Picture is No Country for Old Men, a film that critics — this one included — cherished but has left audiences crying out in despair over the nominal hero’s resignation and the endurance of evil, however hobbled. The downbeat nonending is presented not so much as systemic failure, as in HBO’s The Wire, or the power of unbridled capitalism to poison human relations, as in There Will Be Blood. It is simply that God the Creator has left the field.