No Country for Old Men (2005)

While hunting antelope in the Texas desert, small-town welder Llewellyn Moss runs into the leftovers of a drug deal gone wrong: six dead and dying Mexicans, a gut-shot dog, and a bag full of cash. Moss takes the suitcase (always a mistake) and starts running for his life from a ruthless and ingenious killer named Chigurh, a droid-like figure who feels neither remorse nor fear. With his stripped-down Marlboro Man prose, Cormac McCarthy knows how to write a bang-up Western thriller. But when he strives for grand mythic effect in the second half of No Country for Old Men, his taut, suspenseful story quickly heads south.

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