All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Directed by Billy Bob Thornton
The year is 1949. A young Texan named John Grady finds himself without a home after his mother sells the ranch where he has spent his entire life. Lured south of the border by the romance of cowboy life and the promise of a fresh start, Cole and his pal embark on an adventure that will test their resilience, define their maturity, and change their lives forever.
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What critics compared All the Pretty Horses to
The novelist Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been short of attention from cinema: John Hillcoat made a fine, harrowing film of The Road and there were middling versions of No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
His relationship by QB Winchell all the more effective because of the father-son film history he shares with Lucas Black (who played the boy in Sling Blade and was directed by Thornton in All the Pretty Horses.)
Through sheer chance, he meets a young man - played by Henry Thomas ("All the Pretty Horses," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial") in a decent performance - who just so happens to work for the father killer.
Vallon's identity is only known by his childhood friend Johnny (Henry Thomas, "All the Pretty Horses"), but Johnny's loyalty is weakened when he sees Amsterdam bedding down Jenny (Cameron Diaz, "The Sweetest Thing"), the woman he loves.
Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy (author of All The Pretty Horses and last year's Pulitzer-and-Oprah-approved The Road), No Country For Old Men takes place in the same harsh world as McCarthy's novels.
Joel and Ethan Coen co-directed and co-wrote No Country for Old Men from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, whose laconic masculine output was last mined in 2000's All The Pretty Horses .
When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, "The Fugitive," "In the Valley of Elah") and his deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") come across the corpse strewn mayhem left in the wake of a drug deal gone bad in the Texas desert, he knows that the trail the crime will take him on will prove his conviction that the time he now lives in is "No Country for Old Men." Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen ("Blood Simple," "Fargo," "The Ladykillers") adapt iconic author Cormac McCarthy's ("All the Pretty Horses") novel with the unmistakable Coen touch - outstanding production values, terrific acting, drama leavened - this time barely - by touches of humor.
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Adaptations of Cormac McCarthy novels have ranged from the disappointing ("All the Pretty Horses") to the exquisite ("No Country for Old Men"), but "The Road," adapted by Joe Penhall ("Enduring Love") is a tough nut to crack and, unfortunately, director John Hillcoat ("The Proposition") hasn't been able to crack it.
In a certain sense, McCarthy's fiction, including All the Pretty Horses (and the entire, fantastic Border Trilogy) and No Country for Old Men, has really always been about the end of the world.
Such movies are now highly fashionable and the heavyweight film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road , first published in 2006 (and his third to be filmed after All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men) comes in the wake of three relatively lightweight movies covering similar territory released over the past 10 weeks.