By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic
If you look thither, way out there on the cutting edge of filmmaking, you’ll see the Brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel, who now gift us with “Burn After Reading.” A bit of gallows humor to cleanse the movie palate after “No Country for Old Men” (2007), its tongue is poked full well into cheek. And, by any worthwhile definition, it is art.
Art, in the very least, because the Coens have found a way, via their enticingly trenchant work, to disseminate creativity and invigorative ideas to minds otherwise lost in the mass lockstep. They are aberrantly thought-provoking, out on a limb, cold in their deductions on first blush. Just don’t tell anyone…but there’s a lot of humanity there.
