It's funny, sometimes delightful, sometimes a little sad, with dialogue that sounds perfectly logical until you listen a little more carefully and realize all of these people are mad. Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/burn-after-reading-2008
The brilliantly contrived plot is in the manner of classical farce but it leads to mayhem on a massive scale that escalates from a broken nose to an accidental killing, butchery by axe, and execution by CIA gunmen. It's the ingenuity of it all that holds the audience (along with the performances) rather than any succession of laugh-aloud gags. Phillip French, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/19/comedy- coenbrothers
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 Derek Malcolm London Evening Standard.
Burn After Reading is a blackly comic illustration of Murphy's Law, set in the Washington world of CIA espionage, and populated with a cast of delusional dunces who are a wonder to behold. David Ansen Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/coen-brothers-latest-dark- comedy88973
