Kelly Macdonald and the No Country for Old Men team attended the New York Film Festival on October 6. I’ve added the first set of pictures in the gallery.

As desolate and dark as the west Texas landscape in which it’s set, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is no film for the weak-hearted, either. An admitted weakling when it comes to suspense (see my review of fellow film festival honoree The Orphanage for evidence), I struggled mightily to keep watching, the unbearable tension often only matched by the brutal carnage that followed.

And yet, No Country for Old Men is, dare I say it, funny? It’s been a festival full of drama, a little sex but not much humor, so sitting in a theater full of people laughing feels like a foreign experience at this point. Yet somewhere between the deaths determined by a coin toss and the shots of a dead dog swarmed by flies, the Coens got a few jokes in there, some even at the expense of the psychopathic killer who uses a compressed air tank rather than bullets to the head.

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Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men” has its U.S. premiere tomorrow night, at the New York Film Festival. It opens in theaters on Nov. 9 - so put the date in your calendar now.

An ideal alignment of talents, “No Country” was adapted, with tremendous skill, from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel. Set in 1980, it begins with the weary musings of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), an aging Texas sheriff who still can’t believe he needs to carry - let alone use - a gun. He’ll have to adjust pretty quickly, though, because there are sins unfolding just outside his door.

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