True Grit 
 
 'True Grit' review: Coen brothers' reboot is a wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western 
 
 Sebastian/AP Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld star in Joel and Ethan Coen's 'True Grit.' 
 
 A one-eyed marshal helps a girl find her father"s killer. With Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon. Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen (1:50). PG-13: Violence. At area theaters. 
 
 
 
 Joel and Ethan Coen are rare cinematic originals, which masks how carefully distilled their films are. No matter the source — gangster noirs, cultural footnotes, Homeric journeys, Looney Tunes — they bolster new ideas with classic structure, and make the seasoned seem fresh. 
 
 
 
 Their latest, "True Grit," adapted religiously from Charles Portis' 1968 pulp novel, is a wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout. 
 
 
 
 John Wayne won an Oscar for his own version of quirky in the 1969 original, as U.S. Marshal Reuben (Rooster) Cogburn, a drunkard who called a mangy cat his relative and wore an eyepatch. 
 
 
 
 In the Coens' fable of 1870s retribution, Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is not a sideshow but a serious man. When 14-year-old Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) hires him to find her father's killer, Cogburn heads with her from Arkansas to the Indian territory that would one day be Oklahoma. For part of the way, a preening Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon) rides with them. 
 
 
 
 Their adventure brings them to Chaney (Josh Brolin) and a scarred thug named Lucky Ned (Barry Pepper). The story builds slowly and is filled with character, and the Coens and their longtime cinematographer, Roger Deakins, make every run-in and frontier snowfall feel haunted and poetic. 
 
 
 
 Damon is sly and Steinfeld is sturdy, yet the big question for most viewers — does Bridges sit tall in Wayne's saddle? — is really like comparing a rifle and a six-shooter. 
 
 
 
 The onetime Big Lebowski is always a delight and lets Rooster reveal himself to be (a bit) softer at first, until he slowly pulls out the toughness. (Wayne, the same age in the first movie as Bridges is now, did it flinty, then tender.) 
 
 
 
 Bridges has moments in which Rooster's croaky monologues are as full of nuance as the one eye he's left to work with. His sole peeper darts around, closes in exhaustion and earns our affection, while "True Grit" proves to be as funny and heroic as any other legend, and tells an expert tale to boot. 
 
 
 
 jneumaier@nydailynews.com ||||| That old-time American religion of vengeance runs like a river through “True Grit,” a comic-serious tale about some nasty, brutish times. Beautifully adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from the parodic western novel by Charles Portis, it turns on a 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires a “one-eyed fat man” to hunt down her father’s killer. First published in 1968, Mr. Portis’s tall tale was brought to the screen the next year custom-fitted for John Wayne , who rode the role of that fat man, Rooster Cogburn, straight to an Oscar. Now it’s the thinner scene-stealer Jeff Bridges who sits and sometimes drunkenly slumps in the saddle. 
 
 Much as he did in the raucously entertaining original film directed by Henry Hathaway, Rooster enters on his best behavior, seated in a courtroom amid a fog of cigar smoke and conspicuous lies. The pale, ghostly light comes courtesy of the Coens’ frequent cinematographer, Roger Deakins, while many of the twisty, funny sentences have been plucked by the filmmakers right from the novel. A deputy United States marshal, Rooster has attracted the interest of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, in a terrific film debut), a half-pint who, with her bloodlust and severely braided hair, is an authentic American Gothic. As she listens to Rooster recount his bloody deeds and high body count, her eyes shine with a true believer’s excitement. 
 
 Avenging her father and keeping close track of her family’s expenses are what preoccupy Mattie, a richly conceived and written eccentric, as memorable on the page as she is now on screen. Softened for the first film (in which she was played by a 21-year-old Kim Darby, in a bob), she has been toughed up again by the Coens so that she resembles the seemingly humorless if often unintentionally humorous Scripture-quoting martinet of Mr. Portis’s imagination. At times she brings to mind D. H. Lawrence’s famed formulation that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” At other times, as when she wears her dead father’s oversize coat and hat, she looks like a foolish child left to perilous play. 
 
 Those dangers are telegraphed early by the public hanging that occurs soon after the story opens. Mattie, along with a family worker, Yarnell (Roy Lee Jones), has traveled from her Yell County home to Fort Smith, Ark., to identify her father, who has been gunned down by another worker, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). After doing so, she sends Yarnell home and gets down to business, first by settling her father’s accounts. She then hires Rooster because she hears that he has “true grit,” a quality that mostly seems to entail a disregard for preserving the lives of his prisoners. It’s no wonder she watches the hanging with such avidity, and no wonder too that she takes off after Chaney, armed with Rooster and her father’s heavy gun. 
 
 Their journey leads them into Indian country (with few Indians) and increasingly tense and violent encounters featuring corpses, severed fingers and a bad, bad man (Barry Pepper, spewing fear and spittle). On occasion a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who calls himself LaBeef, joins in the search. Wearing jangling spurs and a luxurious mustache that sits on his lip like a spoiled Persian cat, LaBoeuf hopes to bag Chaney for a large reward. Dead or alive, everyone in this story — snaggletooth thief or boardinghouse owner — has a price either on his head or in mind, usually in the form of the dollars and cents one person hopes to extract from another. “Why do you think I am paying you,” Mattie asks Rooster, “if not to have my way?” ||||| Days before The Social Network hits theaters, critics are saying to forget the Oscar race—David Fincher’s Facebook movie has already won. How good is it? Read the reviews here. Plus, View Our Complete Coverage of The Social Network 
 
 It has already been compared to Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and Balzac. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is a perfect 100 percent. 
 
 Still days from release, The Social Network—you know, that one Facebook movie—has film critics straddling the line between breathless and hallucinatory over its generation-defining zeitgeistiness, brainiac script by Aaron Sorkin, and inspired performances by Jesse Eisenberg, as digital boy-wonder (and Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg, and Andrew Garfield as his BFF-turned-foe. 
 
 Before The Social Network even screened, Oscar pundits were declaring David Fincher’s unsparing portrait of a nerd’s rise to moguldom a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination. 
 
 The buzz has been growing steadily for weeks. Before it was even screened, Oscar pundits were declaring David Fincher’s unsparing portrait of a nerd’s rise to moguldom a shoo-in for a Best Picture nomination. Now that it has screened, they’re saying: Forget the nomination. Hand over the trophy. Film critics, meanwhile, are reaching deep into their arsenals of praise to define what is easily the best-reviewed movie of the year. (Sorry, Toy Story 3.) If there are any naysayers, they have yet to show up to the party. 
 
 It’s the film that “defines the decade,” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers gushes. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis says that it “evokes 19th-century narrative of ambition,” and goes on to quote Le Père Goriot: “To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman.” 
 
 Herewith, a sampling of the love. 
 
 Rolling Stone / A + + + + 
 
 “Award-caliber performances” 
 
 “A modern Rashomon” 
 
 The New York Times / A + + 
 
 “Fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming” 
 
 “A creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: The geek shall inherit the earth.” 
 
 The New York Post / A + + 
 
 “A timeless and compelling story that speaks volumes about the way we live today.” 
 
 “Zuckerberg ultimately commits an act of betrayal of Shakespearean proportions.” 
 
 Variety / A + + 
 
 “Fincher [has a] fascinating transition from genre filmmaker extraordinaire to indelible chronicler of our times.” 
 
 The Hollywood Reporter / A + + + 
 
 “A mesmerizing, bewildering and infuriating protagonist makes this movie about Facebook's creation a must-see.” 
 
 Box Office Magazine / A + + + 
 
 “Mesmerizing” 
 
 “Never less than extraordinary” 
 
 “A landmark masterwork and a must-see movie event” 
 
 IndieWire / A + + + + 
 
 “David Fincher can make five more masterpieces, Aaron Sorkin can win an Oscar, Tony and 20 more Emmys; Timberlake, Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and Mara Rooney can all be big stars for the next half-century, but it will rarely be as sweet as this.” 
 
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– True Grit, the Coen brothers’ latest, updates a John Wayne classic—though it may stick closer to the original novel than the first film. Critics are impressed, with the Rotten Tomatoes score currently at 95%: In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis applauds the film’s 13-year-old star, Hailee Steinfeld, who gives a “memorably ferocious performance” as a “character whose single-minded pursuit of vengeance has unmistakable resonance.” The film is “a winning western with just a few dark eddies beneath the surface, one that features a star-making lead performance and some spectacular photography,” writes Andrew O’Hehir in Salon. Still, it “falls just short of being great.” Writing in the New York Daily News, Joe Neumaier calls the movie a “wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout.”