Peter Howell at the Toronto Star has an amusing freakout in which he expresses frustration that the public is not giving appropriate love to "No County For Old Men," a film he managed to see twice at Cannes and twice since.

I know what you’re saying: "Relax, Pete. No Country is doing just fine.

"Maybe not as fine as Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is doing great, but don’t the critics all love it?"

It’s a good thing he wasn’t as won over by "Syndromes and a Century" or "Colossal Youth," because the heartbreak might just kill him.

As the film makes its way to British cinemas, Joe Queenan at the Guardian speculates that the Coens’ film benefited from its somewhat debated 1980 setting. (And it is 1980 — as Chigurh tells that hapless store owner, the coin deciding his fate is from 1958, and "it’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here.") Queenan writes:

By setting their film in an era that predates the sophisticated devices that have transformed the landscape in the past 20 years, ushering in the Orwellian nightmare, the Coen brothers seem to concede that it is impossible to make an old- fashioned thriller any more. There are too many ways to track killers, too many ways for killers to track the guys who stole their money. Technology is not just ruining daily life. It’s ruining movies.

And Stephen Dalton at the London Times gets to experience one of the brothers’ "trademark Zen minimalist antiinterviews." Here’s their description of "Burn After Reading," their already completed next feature starring George Clooney and Frances McDormand:

“It’s about a CIA analyst and someone who manages a gym in Washington,” Ethan explains. “Hilarity ensues.”

+ No love for No Country has critic cursing chipmunks (Toronto Star)
+ Confessions of a technophobe (Guardian)
+ The elusive Coen Brothers (London Times)