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.