IN a couple of weeks families across the land will open their local newspapers in the secular ritual of finding a Christmas Day movie that everyone can attend. This year there will be the cringe-inducing giggles of “Little Fockers,” the sci-fi splendors of the “Narnia” franchise, an animated picnic with “Yogi Bear” and “True Grit,” a western from those nice Coen boys, Joel and Ethan.

Those would be the same brothers whose dark comedies and twisted genre spoofs turned them into a fetish object for a generation of critics. The ones who created a murderers’ row of cinematic sociopaths, including Anton Chigurh, who used a coin flip to decide the fate of his victims before dispatching them with a cattle gun in the Oscar-winning “No Country for Old Men” from 2007. Both films are set in the West and feature vivid manhunts, but no one would ever mistake “No Country,” or any of the Coens’ other dozen or so films, for a Christmas movie.

Loping in straight and true over the horizon comes “True Grit,” a classic western about a plucky 14-year-old who heads off into Indian country flanked by lawmen to hunt her father’s killer. How classic? The last time around, in 1969, “True Grit” won a best-actor Oscar for a guy named John Wayne.

The Coens’ version brandishes wide-open adventures, grizzled hearts on the sleeve and a young heroine who is by far the biggest pistol in a film full of them. And judging by the late-in-the-year release date, the pedigree of the directors and its gilded cast — Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin — Paramount, the studio that is releasing the $35 million movie, is hoping that “True Grit” will be part of that other big gift-giving evening called the Oscars. Hollywood doesn’t revisit the western genre frequently, and does so at its peril. “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” included the actors Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck but failed to find much commercial traction (although “3:10 to Yuma” did quite a bit better).