Burn After Reading is a comedy that makes fun of almost everything, reminding you that almost none of it is laughing matter.

| Apr 29, 2019

Although there are a couple of vaguely amusing moments, it fails as a comedy because it just isn't funny, and it fails as a thriller because it just isn't suspenseful and it fails as entertainment of any kind because it is all so ludicrously improbable.

| Aug 23, 2018

| Original Score: B | Feb 18, 2012

It's morbidly absurdist, thoroughly pointless, and can certainly be funny at times.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 29, 2008

It's surely old-hat by now to note the writer/directors' pervasive condescension and smugness, a criticism I don't think always holds true, especially when the Brothers more fully explore, e.g. The Man Who Wasn't There, their no less ubiquitous spi

Full Review | Oct 22, 2008

The Coens are loopy stylists, and it's often amusing to watch this comedy of errors unfold. But after a masterpiece like No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading is classified as disposable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2008

The great strength of the Coen brothers is their scripts, and Burn After Reading is not only one of their most skilfully plotted films, it's also one of their wittiest.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 17, 2008

Made with the absolute assurance of filmmakers who know exactly what they're doing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 17, 2008

Halfway between a good Coen brothers movie and a terrible Coen brothers movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 17, 2008

Indeed, the spies and thrills don't add up at all. The plot is a total mistake. The characters are madly absurd. The film shouldn't work, but it does.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2008

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

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 17, 2008

Glib, unfunny, patronising: take your pick.

| Oct 17, 2008

The whole thing is a triumphant exercise in the art of silliness for its own sake.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 17, 2008

If No Country For Old Men was vintage port, Burn After Reading is a shot of tequila: eye watering and hard to swallow, but the after-effect is terrific.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2008

But wait. Didn't screwball farce go out 70 years ago? Around the time of Harry Cohn? Aren't we watching necromancy in action? Yes, yes and yes.

| Oct 17, 2008

Deceptively dark for all its lightness, Coen haters will be infuriated by a stylish conceit that perversely sets out not to amount to a hill of beans.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2008

As it is, the Coens have constructed, with the aid of some of the best players in the business, a comedy that, like those other brothers called Marx, is spitefully able to make monkeys of practically everybody.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2008

Burn After Reading is a disposable lark, and it's treated by the filmmakers as such; Forget After Seeing would be a far more honest title.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2008

The surface foolishness of the Coens' latest feels like a carefully designed bit of misdirection aimed at masking another tale of lonely, aimless people.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 17, 2008

For fans of the Coens... it suggests, especially on the heels of No Country for Old Men, that they have rediscovered their cinematic vision after several lean years.

| Sep 16, 2008