In the Loop

Directed by Armando Iannucci

(Not rated)

***

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A satirical look at international diplomacy

What The West Wing was to America, In the Loop is to Britain, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. While Aaron Sorkin used government as a “source of dramatic energy” for his TV show, director Armando Iannucci sees statecraft as a bottomless well of material for satire. Expanding upon his BBC series The Thick of It, Iannucci has created a film that’s “scads more acerbic than anything that would have been tolerated in the White House of Jed Bartlet.” In this brainy comedy, a dimwitted British minister of international development slips up in an interview and nearly commits Britain to a U.S.-led war, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Though Iraq war ­references are obvious, the jokes “are less topical than procedural.” Iannucci employs a mock-vérité approach to expose the dirty business of bureaucracy, where “opportunism trumps idealism” and everybody betrays everybody. Welcome to the wonderful­ world of institutional incompetence, said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. Iannucci’s film is a “smart and sharp jab at the suits and skirts” who give democracy a bad name.