A movie that’s not for everyone. It toys with audience, addressing them, playing with the implied standard thriller narrative and even implicating them in the brutality that occurs to the family when two sociopathic tennis-clad men trap them in their home.

An uncomfortable watch, even through most of the actual violence is off-screen you want to stop watching. With this, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, it’s been a brilliant but uncomfortable few months at the cinema.

During There Will Be Blood you are continually fighting the urge to get away from Daniel Plainview, portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis, but you can’t tear your eyes off the screen. Even as Plainview’s compulsion to win at all costs leads down a destructive path.

As unnerving as the Oscar-stealing performance of Day Lewis is, it is the music that has stayed with me. Atonal off-notes heighten the queasy feelings and create an impending dread throughout, acting as an musical greek chorus. An absolutely blistering movie; hard work, but should not be missed.

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.