Possibly the best Coen Brothers movie

I haven't read the book and I never saw the original version of the movie, so the Coen Brothers' "True Grit" is my only point of comparison here, but I found the movie very compelling and entertaining. I'm up and down on the Coens, but this seems to me their best movie yet - it plays well to their strengths, which tend to be strong narrative, a good sense of place, and a feeling for the Gothic and grotesque. Sometimes they let their taste for the grotesque run away with their movies, as in the awful A Serious Man, but they use it perfectly in True Grit, as we find the main characters wandering through the Choctaw Nation in the late 19th century in pursuit of a killer - so when they come across a strange, almost alien figure (a roving doctor living inside a bearskin) or a hideous scene (a corpse hanging high in tree) it builds of the strangeness and danger of the land and lines they're transgressing. Most of the reaction to the movie is inevitably about the young Hailee Steinfeld who plays the absurdly, comically precocious 14-year-old lead - she may win an Oscar, and she does play the part really well: speaking somehow in a very archaic and highly sophisticated diction, like a 19th-century novel come to life on the American frontier. You can't really believe her, or in fact this entire adventure, if you think about it for five minutes, but I found myself very captivated by the characters and hanging on the dialogue, as unlikely as it was. Jeff Bridges in the lead is excellent, though he sure does mumble, and he's in danger of being typecast as a near-ruined alcoholic with a good heart and with principles (cf. Crazy Heart). Matt Damon his usual wooden self. Only significant flaw in the movie, however (Spoiler alert!) is the conclusion: The whole mission is to kill or take fugitive, and as it turns out he's shot and killed without much of a fuss, and then the movie becomes a kind of aimless adventure yarn as Hailee falls in a pit, gets bit by a snake - is this in the original, or a Coen contrivance? Concluding scene - Hailee as an adult - not really a satisfactory coda to the mood of this otherwise very strong movie.