No Country for Old Men/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: The film is far better known than the novel, and many consider it to be superior.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Mostly of Anton Chigurh. Those characters who know about him act like he's an unstoppable badass, but think about it. Sure, he kills plenty of people, but always by taking them by surprise/attacking them while they're unarmed/using an exotic weapon that most people wouldn't recognize/all three at once. When he finally confronts someone who is ready and able to put up a fight, he is wounded and loses his quarry. When he is faced with the prospect of a fight with Sheriff Bell, he runs away. Finally, at the end of the movie he murders Moss' innocent and unarmed wife, and then just barely escapes the police with the help of two children. The guy isn't a badass; he's just a cowardly psycho with delusions of magnificence.
  • More than likely, though, he deserves his reputation, just not in the sense of an invincible killing machine invulnerable to bullets. What makes him such an effective killer is that he is able to pick his fights carefully and only risk himself when it's necessary. Also, what about the aftermath of the hotel fight that kills Llewelyn Moss? The heavily armed Mexican Hitmen who've got him outnumbered run away from him out of fear. He also shows signs of being very intelligent and having a lot of survival skills.
    • What makes Chigurh so unstoppable isn't his exceptional skill, endurance, cunning and intelligence (though he has all of those things in spades); it's his indomitable willpower. That's kind of the entire point: he's an anti-Ubermensch.
  • Is Sheriff Bell the last of a dying brand of justice, incapable of containing a rising tide of evil, or a self-pitying old man so preoccupied with the past that he has become ineffectual in the present?
• Complete Monster: Anton Chigurh, who's about as close to Johan Liebert as you can get in a live action film.
  • The boy whom Sheriff Bell tells about at the beginning was used to foreshadow Anton's role and character. He was executed for killing a fourteen-year-old girl, after having told Bell that he had planned to kill someone as long as he could remember, and he'd do it again if he could. Bell states: "I thought I'd never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin' if maybe he was some new kind."
• Crowning Music of Awesome: After almost exclusively diegetic music ^[1] for the whole film (and barely any of it, at that), Carter Burwell's bone-chilling theme finally plays during the credits, and it is PERFECT. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to hear without simply playing the scene over and over on your DVD, because no soundtrack was released and as far as I can tell it's impossible to find the MP3 on the Internet. It can, however, be heard in its entirety on Youtube here.
• Designated Hero: Moss is unusual in that he seems to be a deliberate example of this trope. He is impulsive, prideful, greedy, and his actions get a lot of innocent people killed as well as ensuring his own doom. However, we are not supposed to see him as a hero so much as a greedy, stupid man in a situation far out of his depth and one who is every bit as ruthless as the men chasing him. The only thing he really has going for him is that the man chasing him is a lot worse.
• Fashion Victim Villain: Regarding the haircut, in the actor's words, "I'm not going to get laid for three months." Unlike most examples of the trope, it actually makes Anton scarier instead of laughable.
• Memetic Mutation: The Implied Facepalm. When something is just so stupid that actually performing a Face Palm would be unnecessary.
• Magnum Opus: Many consider the film to be the Coens' best, and that's saying a lot.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Mexican mobsters cross it when they massacre every guest at the hotel just to kill Moss. Chigurh also kills pretty much anyone who gets in his way as he moves around the country, and in one case kills an innocent person purely on principle.

"Can you get those chicken crates out of the bed?"

• Nightmare Fuel: Indeed.
• Squick: Somewhat of a Fridge Squick. In the hotel shootout scene, when Llewelyn tumbles out of the pickup truck, he's covered in blood. It takes a second for it to sink in that it's not HIS blood.
  • Also, Chigurh cleaning his wounds. As well as the bone sticking out of his arm.
• Too Dumb to Live: The cop at the beginning. How bad at your job do you have to be to nonchalantly turn your back on a suspect whose mobility is in no way impaired? Never mind strangulation by handcuffs, he could have just as easily sneaked out the door.
  • The victim whose car is stolen shortly after the above. What was this guy thinking? "Guy in cop car pulls me over, looks like death personified, no badge, carrying a white fire extinguisher thingy. Seems legit."

1. ↑ That is, only music from an identifiable onscreen source