It has been a great year for Tommy Lee Jones. The actor brings his careworn, old-school machismo to two of the best films of the year, the Coen brothers’ outstanding No Country for Old Men and Paul Haggis’s most satisfying film to date, In the Valley of Elah. And the films share more than Jones - both use the talents of the cinematographer Roger Deakins, a British director of photography who is peculiarly gifted when it comes to capturing the big, brooding skies and scrubby dust bowls of the southern US. In addition, both films cast Jones as a man out of his time, adrift in a world that he no longer recognises.

In this latest picture, Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a by-the-book former military man whose soldier son Mike has gone Awol on his first weekend home from Iraq. Hank hopes that his army connections will help to lessen the mess that his son seems to have got into. But those army connections have long since retired and the military itself is not the noble beast that Hank once knew. A prickly partnership with a local police detective, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) reveals some of the ugly truths behind the case and Hank’s tightly buttoned world unravels.

Jones’ Oscar-nominated performance is impeccably judged. His low-key turn as a man forced to question everything from the kind of father he was to the nature of the country he fought for could be the contender to give Daniel Day-Lewis a run for his money. Haggis’s superb script is multi-layered, a study of one man’s personal odyssey, but also a snapshot of a nation at a time of conflict that creates as many monsters as it crushes.

The only off-key moment comes right at the end, with the choice of a maudlin Annie Lennox song on the soundtrack that is starkly at odds with the stoically unsentimental film that precedes it.

15, 121mins

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