Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

USA | 2008 | 120mins | 35mm | Colour

At the headquarters of the CIA in Arlington, Virginia, analyst Osborne Cox arrives for a top-secret meeting. Unfortunately for Cox, the secret is soon out: he is being ousted. Cox does not take the news particularly well and returns to his Georgetown home to work on his memoirs and his drinking, not necessarily in that order. His wife Katie is dismayed, though not particularly surprised; she is already well into an illicit affair with Harry, a married federal marshal, and sets about making plans to leave Cox for Harry.

Elsewhere in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, Hardbodies Fitness Centers employee Linda can barely concentrate on her work. She is consumed with her life plan for extensive cosmetic surgery, and reveals her mission to her can-do colleague, Chad Feldheimer. Linda is all but oblivious to the fact that the gym's manager Ted Treffon pines for her, even as she arranges dates via the Internet with other men.

When a computer disc containing material for the CIA analyst's memoirs accidentally falls into the hands of Linda and Chad, the duo are intent on exploiting their find. As Ted frets, events spiral out of everyone's and anyone's control, in a cascading series of darkly hilarious encounters.

The [Coen] brothers have conjured a crazy-quilt, comic thriller in the form of a sex farce. The result is wildly funny…and indisputably daring – Rolling Stone