In the Loop – 5 stars

A gut-busting, literate comedy about the run-up to a fictitious war (clearly meant to be Iraq) and the involvement of US and British civil servants in the process, which includes vicious political jockeying, abusive message control, mendacious leaks, pettiness of the grandest of scales, and biting insults. Armando Iannucci’s script was rightly nominated and proved to be the forerunner to the hilarious HBO series, Veep.

In many ways,  it echoes the British The Office, with politics supplanting paper.  The repartee’ is smart, crackling and hilarious.  The film is a series of verbal jousts, this one, on the eve of a critical U.N. vote, being my favorite:

Tom Hollander (Pirates of the Caribbean and scene stealing as King George in HBO’s John Adams) is brilliant as a British minister out-of-his-depth and made a pawn, and James Gandolfini, a you can see above, is also memorable as an American general trying to slow down a march to war.

Of course, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) is a personal hero: