All The Pretty Horses

Director Billy Bob Thornton holds these truths to be self-evident: A sweeping Western landscape is worth 1,000 words; horses are just about God's finest creations, though spirited young women and stoic young men come close; and Cormac McCarthy's spare narrative can survive separation from his evocative prose. Set in 1949, the same period as THE HI-LO COUNTRY, McCarthy's novel is suffused with the same sense of loss at the spectacle of the fabled Western frontier dwindling before corporate America's ruthless encroachment. After his grandpa dies and his estranged mother sells off the family's West Texas spread, young John Grady Cole (Matt...