Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Director Armando Iannucci in attendance.

This hilarious satire of British-U.S. international relations and governmental bureaucracy is sure to keep fans of “The Daily Show” and “The Office” in stitches (the BBC-produced film itself is a loose adaptation of the British television show “The Thick of It.”) With razor-sharp wit and brilliant comic performances, IN THE LOOP depicts both countries’ political systems as a game of one-upmanship in which the incompetent, the naïve, and the evil-hearted jockey for power and information in a comedy of errors on a massive scale.

The British prime minister’s director of communications is Malcolm Tucker, an aggressively foul-mouthed Scot who assaults his enemies with a rapid-fire repertoire of insults drawing on everything from Victorian literature to indie rock bands. He’s just discovered that Simon Foster, the minister for international development, has caused a media hailstorm with his radio remark that war in the Middle East is “unforeseeable.” This one word—and Simon’s hapless attempts to amend it—reverberates across the pond to reach two feuding U.S. delegates, both of whom use Simon’s incomprehensible ramblings to support their own positions. Ambitious assistants, vengeful exes, a belligerent constituent (in a chameleon-like turn by the infamous Steve Coogan) and an anti-war four-star general (played with gravely voiced smugness by James Gandolfini) all get into the act as childish power plays escalate toward a war conducted primarily for appearances’ sake.

- Kristina Aikens