20 Spy Movies You Must See Before You Die

Burn After Reading flew under the radar upon first release and was met with mixed reviews in the wake of the Coens' Oscar-winning classic No Country for Old Men.

Time has been good to this vision of paranoia, however, which is essentially a movie about nothing on purpose. If that sounds boring, it isn't, because the Coens have crafted a strange, funny meditation on the spy genre that delights in its characters' insistence on getting stuff wrong over and over again.

Everything that happens in Burn After Reading occurs due to a misunderstanding and the entire plot comes as a consequence of a mistake. Basically, though, the anti-story of the film paves the way for great performances from Brad Pitt and George Clooney who are both at their unashamedly goofiest. Props, also, to Carter Burwell's astonishingly - and unnecessarily - paranoid musical score.

The final scene sums up the mentality of the film nicely as a number of important CIA people stand around wondering what they learned from the whole messy affair. The final summation? "I guess we learned not to do it again."