.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

As a reviewer, there is little preparation you can put in before seeing a Coen brothers film. With other directors, you can watch their filmography and gain some insight into what they are about to bring to the screen due to the evolution of their work. Watch a box set of Oliver Stone films and you clearly get the picture of a man who was at the top of his game in the late 1980's only to start using weird and distracting edits which diminished his later works. Watch M. Night films and you definitely see someone who has gone down the rabbit hole of self-indulgence. But the Coen borthers (Ethan and Joel) - they just keep chugging out one strange and wonderful picture after another while creating some of the most interesting characters ever put before a camera.

From Blood Simple and Raising Arizona right through Fargo and last years Academy Award darling, No Country For Old Men, each of their films are unique but they never swayed from the what has worked for them in the past which is putting simple characters in complex situations.

Burn After Reading is their follow up to No Country For Old Men and returns them to their more comedic roots. Burn stars just a handful of names that you may have heard before. George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and someone named Brad Pitt. The story is as convoluted as anything they have put on screen before. Harry (Clooney) is having an affair with Katie (Swinton) who is married to Oz (Malkovich) who is being blackmailed by Chad (Pitt) and Linda (McDormand) who just so happens to also be sleeping with Harry. If you can follow the bouncing ball, then Burn After Reading is the film to see this fall. It is full of some of the most wonderfully developed characters and bring their individual quirks and narcoses to a plot that involves divorce, murder, the CIA and situations that are too far fetched to be true, but are played out with such ease that you forget the plot stretches for the benefit of overall entertainment.

There isn't a character in Burn After Reading that isn't a subject to marvel. From Pitt's Health and Fitness guru Chad to Richard Jenkins and scene stealer David Rasche, there isn't a single character that you didn't wish had more screen time. And by the time the dots start connecting and we realize exactly who everyone is in connection to each other, you will not necessarily be laughing out loud (although there is one scene in which we see something the Harry was building as a gift for his wife which did induce audible chuckling in the theatre), but you will have one of those smiles that you will take out of the screening with you.

This might not a piece that the Coen's will be remembered for in 15 years, but coming off an Oscar win, they did much better than Spielberg, who followed Saving Private Ryan with A.I or Steven Soderbergh that parlayed the golden statue from Traffic into the big budget yawn fest Ocean's 11. Burn After Reading will be likened to Fargo meets The Big Lebowski. It is fun. It is without question quirky. And it is undeniably Coen.