which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves." Style While No Country for Old Men is a "doggedly faithful" adaptation of McCarthy's 2005 novel and its themes, the film also revisits themes which the Coens had explored in their earlier movies Blood Simple and Fargo. The three films share common themes, such as pessimism and nihilism. The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate [and] circumstance" in earlier works including Raising Arizona, which featured another hitman, albeit less serious in tone. Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping, but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy's novel." Still, the Coens open the film with a voice-over narration by Tommy Lee Jones (who plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) set against the barren Texas country landscape where he makes his home. His ruminations on a teenager he sent to the chair explain that, although the newspapers described the boy's murder of his 14-year-old girlfriend as a crime of passion, "he told me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes." Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praised the narration. "These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy", he said. "But I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film,