Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading is a dark spy-comedy from Academy Award winners Joel and Ethan Coen. The madness begins when a ex-CIA analyst’s memoirs make their way into the hands of two gym employees. The ensemble cast could not be improved, George Clooney and Brad Pitt are A-list morons, John Malkovich is volcanically abusive, and Tilda Swinton, stiff with beady-eyed suspicion, is a perfect comic foil. After the portentous No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen return to their trademark brand of cruel, misanthropic farce with dark comedy and a bizarre narrative. In the end, Burn After Reading is a film that is essentially about nothing much at all but it goes about achieving that nothing in such audaciously funny ways that it turns out to be something extraordinary.