In the Loop

Brilliantly written, acted, directed and as sharp, scary, cynical, hilarious and about as now as a comedy could be, In the Loop is the goods. Directed with scalpel-like smarts by Armando Ianucci and featuring Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini, Peter Capaldi, Anna Chlumsky and Steve Coogan, the machine gun–fast satire takes off from the BBC TV series The Thick of It and spirals into inspired lunacy as the President of the United States and Britain’s Prime Minister decide to join hands and, without provocation, begin a run-up to a full-scale war in the Middle East. In the melee, spin becomes fact, truth becomes a casualty, memos get rewritten to suit the needs of the government and both the U.S. and Britain’s confederacy of political dunces get served. You’d have to reach back to Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to find a funnier, more diabolical skewering of paranoia, incompetence, deliberate misinformation, back-peddling and double-dealing.

Do yourself a favor and stop any friend who attempts to tell you too much about the movie or to quote any of its one-liners—no movie has had this many zingers since Withnail & I. It’s a film not to be missed, thanks in part to great performances by Gandolfini as a military man with a dove-ish nature, Capaldi as a permanently apoplectic, scaldingly volatile communications director for the Prime Minister, slimy politician David Rasche, befuddled Minister for International Development Simon Foster and, really, pretty much every actor in the thing. In the midst of Obama-love, In the Loop may pick at painful wounds many would like to forget, but here’s a movie so fast, cocky and smart that the hurt is therapeutic.