The Coen brothers' latest film�- the madcap comedy Burn After Reading�- has sharply dual-lane the critics, unlike last year's acclaimed No Country For Old Men which won foursome Oscars including best picture.
Early reviews of the eagerly-awaited picture have begun to appear following its man premiere at the Venice film festival, which brought A-listers George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and hundreds of screaming fans, to the bolshevik carpet.
Trade newspaper publisher Variety panned the comic spy lampoon, calling it a "flame-out".
"Nothing about the project's instruction execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one," wrote Todd McCarthy.
"As it is, interview teeth-grinding sets in other and ne'er lets up."
Many of the warm words he had for Burn After Reading were reserved for Pitt, appearing in a Coen film for the number one time.
Like respective other critics, McCarthy praised Pitt's depiction of a naive, overactive gym instructor who tries to gouge money from a pillaged CIA analyst whose raw memoirs he stumbles across when a computer disc is dropped by accident.
"Pitt slices the ham identical thick so, but uniquely emerges as endearing in doing so," he said.
At the other end of the scale was Screen International's Lee Marshall, world Health Organization called the movie "a beautifully produced mix of spy story, US zeitgeist satire and relationship drama".
"(Burn) is a smart urban screwball funniness about the perils of idiocy that uses its all-star draw to glary and often hilarious effect."
Wendy Ide of the Times in London gave the film quatern stars out of five-spot, and singled out Pitt and John Malkovich as the best performances.
Malkovich is the heavy-drinking, aggressive CIA analyst, while Clooney, appearance in his third Coen movie, plays an exercise-obsessed federal marshal who cheats on his wife.
Ide's primary reservation is that the cast of characters it would be fair to describe as idiotic fails to elicit much sympathy in the audience.
"It would perhaps be more rewarding if we could like the characters as well as laugh at them," Ide concludes.
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter, in a sundry review, calls Burn "a minor part of silliness with all the furnishing of an A-list studio movie".
In conclusion, he quotes a line from a CIA military officer in the movie world Health Organization has simply been told about the baffling serial of events surrounding the missing memoirs.
"Report back to me when it makes sense."
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