Burn After Reading

Directed by John Coen and Ethan Coen, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand

Burn After Reading is a tightly wound spy comedy that couldn't be a bigger contrast to the Coen brothers' last film, the bloodsoaked and brooding No Country for Old Men. Burn is a bit of a bantamweight: fast-moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can.

Clocking in at a crisp 95 minutes, the film got the Venice Film Festival off to a rousing start and is a suitably star-stuffed offering, finding room for George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton, who, after all those years slogging it out for low-budget avant-gardists, is now supping at the high table of Hollywood aristocracy.

Set in Washington DC, it moves in four directions at the same time. Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) is a superannuated CIA analyst who starts writing his memoirs. A computer disc containing his alarming-sounding background material ends up in the gormless clutches of Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), whose reaction is to try blackmail.

The cosmetic surgery-obsessed Litzke is also scouring internet dating sites and starts something with serial adulterer Harry P Farrer (Clooney). But he is already having an affair with Cox's wife, Katie (Swinton); and it's the latter's sneaky investigation of her husband's financial resources as she gears up for a divorce that triggers the whole information-loss plot thread.

With such a profusion of attention-grabbing performers, it's hardly surprising that the first narrative motor - the fools-after-money trope of which the Coens appear so fond - is subordinated to backstabbing emotional shenanigans.

It's also stuffed with the usual throwaway brilliancies: McDormand has a running gag with a computerized switchboard that can't recognize she is speaking English, while Swinton does a very subtle bit of eye acting to suggest she's turned on by the thought of rooting through her husband's bank records.

Where does this film leave the Coens? Their unique position, as darlings of both the Hollywood set and the festival circuit, is unchanged. They have come up with a light-as-fluff flipside to hardcore "insider" films such as All the President's Men, painting the powers that be as goofy and chaotic. This lot couldn't bug their way out of a paper bag.

Burn After Reading may also go down as arguably the Coens' happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-list - but this bit of career development may also be contributing to a diminishment of their film-making strengths. Or perhaps they are evolving. Their films are now more simply natural to look at and experience. Whether it will pay off at the Oscar ceremony or box office remains to be seen. The Guardian