I was beginning to wonder if the Coen Brothers had lost it. About halfway through their ill-advised remake of the Ealing classic The Ladykillers, I was gripped by the same sort of sadness that comes with the childhood realization that your parents aren't infallible, nor do they have all the answers. For the first time in their filmmaking career, they seemed not just human, but deeply flawed. Redemption is a world away from directing Tom Hanks in a poor approximation of Alec Guiness, but the Coens made a long journey into the desert, and have returned with a film that may be accurately described as their finest ever without a trace of hyperbole.

From the first frames of No Country for Old Men, it is clear that the brothers are back in territory they've long been away from. The dry Texas landscape recalls Blood Simple, the quietly measured menace recalls Miller's Crossing or Barton Fink. But there's a new element here that sets No Country distinctly apart from any of their work, and his name is Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy's bloody and beautiful novel comes to life under the Coen's able touch. And surprisingly, for two filmmakers more inclined to extremely loose adaptations of source material on those occasions when they don't originate their own screenplays, the film follows the novel with near dogmatic rigor. The ending is somewhat truncated for better cinematic effect, and one character is written out to streamline the lead-in to the story's most surprising twist, but other than that the movie exists on screen almost as if McCarthy's book was a draft of the screenplay.

The story is fairly straightforward. A hunter (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad in the dusty southwest Texas backcountry. He finds a satchel full of money which he takes back to home sweet trailer with the hope of making a new life for himself and his young bride. But the getaway ends up being not as clean as he'd hoped (due to an attack of conscience on his part), and he is hunted by a ruthless bounty hunter (Javier Bardem) who is in turn being tracked via a trail of bodies by the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones). As the Coen's Dude might say, it's a complicated case, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous, a lot of interested parties.

The brilliance of the source material is its coldly dispassionate take on the whole affair, humanized by occasional first person narration from the world-weary sheriff. McCarthy even goes so far as to completely skip over showing what should be the climax of the story, only showing its aftermath as he finally lays his cards on the table and reveals the story not to be about who or what the reader has been led to believe. The movie follows the same pattern, keeping its characters at arms length until returning again and again to the sheriff, whose segments play out like a Greek chorus commenting on the carnage unfolding around him.

Most of that carnage comes at the hands of Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a bounty hunter whose calm countenance in the commission of the most heinous acts of brutality would cause Hannibal Lecter himself to quail. But while Bardem's pageboy coiffed killer is a movie villain for the ages, it's Jones' performance that leads the stellar cast. The role has tragedy in epic helpings, yet is nuanced to a point of uncomfortable intimacy. The world seen through his eyes is one that is slipping away from him. Once he understood it. It made sense. The death and destruction of the story rattles him to the core, not just because he can't stop it, but because it doesn't fit into the world that he's known all his life. The depths of sadness and heartbreak in Jones' eyes is gut wrenching.

As one would expect, the Coens push the moments of black humor buried in McCarthy's prose to the surface. These bits of levity do lighten the heavy mood, but often do much more: when Josh Brolin's character goes shopping for some clothes to replace those he's tattered and lost in the chase, the shopkeeper tells him all they carry are white socks, and would that be O.K.? "That's all I ever wear," he replies, revealing a great deal about his character with swift economy and a side of laughter.

But don't let the humor fool you. No Country for Old Men is the Coens' darkest and bleakest film to date, full of as many nervous ruminations on fate and violence and growing old as it is full of breathtaking thrills. The ending recalls the calm, abrupt conclusion to Barton Fink, but without the final bit of surrealist humor. This quiet end after a movie that barrels along like a series of runaway trains is a splash of icy water to the face. The filmmakers leave the audience cold, hopeless, and hollow, yet wanting to go back and experience it all over again.

Now playing at E Street Cinema, expands to more theaters around the area next Friday.