This year’s ‘Best Picture’ and deservedly so, this takes you on a terrifying and unpredictable ride through Mexico and Texas on the trail of 2 million dollars from a failed drug deal. The dialogue is lyrical but the characters exist three-dimensionally despite the multiple threads of the plot. The film jack-knifes through the tale in unexpected but believable ways, never testing the credulity of the viewer leaving you riveted to your seat.

Bardem is terrific as the unhinged assassin trailing the money and the anti-hero through the landscape, a role that could have been an featureless cipher of pure evil, but is fully realised into a memorable villain.