Adapting a novel by Cormac McCarthy did wonders for the Coen brothers last year in No Country for Old Men. Now the Aussie director John Hillcoat takes on McCarthy's The Road, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen, a fine actor who just keeps getting better) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland (no computer effects; the film was shot mostly in Pennsylvania). Charlize Theron appears in flashbacks in the enlarged role of the wife and mother. Hillcoat says that "it's fine to depart from the book as long as you maintain the spirit of it." That could be a hack's excuse in the mouth of a lesser talent than Hillcoat. But his criminally underseen 2005 Western, The Proposition, is such a dynamite package of human frailty and resilience that you know McCarthy's tale is in the right hands.