I'm not really sure I understand the articles and what the author is trying to say other than, "I don't like these movies, and here's some vague reasons why."
That's understandable. They're for people with an advanced knowledge and comprehension of film. I suggest The House Next Door for beginners or if you need some formalist or "literary" reading of a film. Strangely enough, two of the articles don't even say whether or not their respective authors like the films they're discussing.
Besides, there are the limitations of space and demand in print journalism and blogs (if you want something more thorough, you can buy books on film), although I don't know how these can be construed as vague at all:
"In the past, the Coens have gotten a lot of mileage out of ridiculing most country folk for their stupidity while singling out a chosen few for admiration. But here, in deference to the source material, the condescension is toned down considerably. They show off their narrative expertise by converting some of the sheriff’s plaintive monologues into terse dialogue and even more in the way they juxtapose the separate movements of Moss and Chigurh, sketching out a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game with some of the primal impact of silent pictures.
What gives all of this a special kick is the way the killer commits murder without so much as a twitch, behavior we’re clearly expected to regard with a certain amount of awe. Chigurh isn’t an intellectual like Hannibal Lecter, and he lacks his cosmopolitan sense of humor, but he slays many more innocent people. And except for a stray line toward the end of the film, when he briefly alludes to his own birth being occasioned by blind chance, there isn’t a trace of psychological speculation about what makes him tick — only a passing remark by Carson Wells that he operates according to a twisted moral code of his own."
"Daniel Kasman summed up the Coens' A Serious Man (and Haneke's like-minded The White Ribbon) like this here last year: "a cinema of such precise predetermination that the movies are in essence over before you even sit down to watch them." This applies to True Grit as well, but, as in the Coens' better films, the predetermination is less a question of subjecting the characters to a gauntlet and more an outgrowth of the characters themselves. Throw Jeff Bridges' borderline-incomprehensible drunk, Hailee Steinfeld's determined girl, Matt Damon's flamboyant Texan and Josh Brolin's Neanderthal bandit into any scenario, and you'd probably end up with the same outcome, because their characters, however well-defined, are unbendable. This, essentially, is what makes True Grit an anti-classical Western (however "old-fashioned" it may try to present itself as being), because the classical Westerns, even Budd Boetticher's leanest, built their dynamics around a pliability of character; rules and motivations were bent, either by the landscape or by the needs of the community / group. The characters of True Grit, on the other hand, travel towards each other in straight lines across the desolate Indian Territory; their inevitable collisions are not a question of fate or morality, but entirely based on their personas—and this, in turn, raises the question of whether the film is nihilist or existentialist."
