Burn After Reading: Critic Reviews

Once more in Burn After Reading [the Coens] goof around, in their arch, bemused way, with conventions of genre -- a little screwball here, some spy spoof there.

Burn After Reading, the clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but little heart.

Burn After Reading is the Coens' most mediocre film in a long time: a desperately strained black comic farce.

A tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy.

The brisk pace and sharp humor in Burn After Reading is a welcome relief after weeks of witless comedies and overblown action flicks.

The high-octane cast works hard. But there's nothing to suggest anybody off camera tried that hard, which is fatal to a Coen outing.

The difference between Burn After Reading and much better Coen comedies like Raising Arizona, Fargo, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? is that the brothers' smugness has finally gone over the top.

A characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.

It has its moments, but is all too easy to erase from your memory.

Burn After Reading could just as well have been called Forget After Seeing.

Burn After Reading is neither an instant classic like No Country for Old Men nor a psychedelic playground like The Big Lebowski. But it is a Coen brothers kick in the pants.

As a chance to watch a gaggle of Serious Actors ham it up in an intricately plotted (though easy to follow) yarn, it's a well-executed diversion.

The ensemble is at once loose and pitch perfect. Hardly a one of them plays a wholly likable person, yet each reveals the despearate or stupid humanity of their characters.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it's 'no biggie.'

Even black comedy requires that the filmmakers love someone, and the mock cruelties in Burn After Reading come off as a case of terminal misanthropy.

It's funny, sometimes delightful, sometimes a little sad, with dialogue that sounds perfectly logical until you listen a little more carefully and realize all of these people are mad.

On screen, delusional schmoes are more fun than smart people, and in the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, the imperious former spook played by John Malkovich accuses his blackmailers...of heading a league of morons.

After the portentous No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen return to their trademark brand of cruel, misanthropic farce, and for dark laughs and hurtling narrative momentum this spy caper is their best work since Fargo.

A goofy screwball romp that affords a gaggle of A-listers the chance to hambone around in antic style.

Shot, scored and edited like a paranoid conspiracy thriller, but acted with comic exuberance by a brilliant ensemble cast, it presents itself seriously while making hardly any sense at all.

A thoroughly disposable comic romp made by a bunch of people who probably should have been working on bigger and better things, Burn After Reading is sure to frustrate just about anyone who goes to see it.

Mostly we're along for a curious ride. Individual scenes are enjoyable, some laugh-out-loud funny. But it's not a story being told, really, so much as an exercise in ongoing and increasing stupidity on the part of the characters.

Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, from their own screenplay, strikes me as one of the most willfully awful movies I've ever seen.

Everything here has been dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note.

Most audiences will find it a head-scratcher with a dismaying act of violence and a haphazard plot that fizzles out without any of the main characters on-screen.