10 Amazing Movie Scenes That Came Totally Out Of Nowhere

The Coen brothers' black comedy Burn After Reading is a terrifically entertaining screwball farce in which two dim-witted gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), inadvertently come into possession of a disc containing sensitive CIA information, and promptly attempt to sell it.

For the first two-thirds of the movie's runtime, the point seems to be that all the focal players - Chad and Linda, and the various "intelligence" employees - are so overpoweringly incompetent that everybody will probably remain alive and kicking by film's end.

But that changes drastically when Chad sneaks into the home of former CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) in order to acquire more information about him, all while paranoid U.S. Marshall Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) also searches the house.

Eventually Harry discovers Chad hiding in a closet, and upon being startled immediately opens fire at a smiling Chad, painting the closet with his brains.

The juxtaposition, of Chad's smiling face with the brutal gunshot coming a second later, and the inherent silliness of the scene with its violent outcome, feels so insanely out of left-field, even from the filmmakers who brought us No Country for Old Men a mere year earlier.