The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is finally out here in the UK. Although I enjoyed it, and would rate it amongst the best of their films, I still have something of a hard time understanding the insane hype it’s been getting from critics everywhere. It’s nothing new in their oeuvre, and hardly represents a significant development for them beyond its toning down of their usual cinematic playfulness.

Faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the Coens evidently found in him a kindred spirit. The film is basically a less showy reworking of earlier works such as Blood Simple (1984), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996). As if the filmmakers decided, once and for all, to get what they wanted to achieve with those movies exactly right.

There Will Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, and out now, is a great piece of baroque cinema. Sharing more than a passing semblance with Erich von Stroheim’s monumental Greed (1924), this is high Hollywood classicism brought through the wringer of idiosyncratic, but grand ambition. As Manohla Dargis points out in her somewhat hyperbolic but nevertheless excellent review, the filmmaker here finds what his earlier efforts have lacked, a great theme. The overwrought ostentatiousness of Boogie Nights (1997) or Magnolia (1999) is turned into an asset in this quintessentially American fable of soul-destroying enterprise, in that it consolidates the archetypical nature of the narrative.