The Family Filmgoer

Watching With Kids in Mind

Burn After Reading (R, 97 minutes)

Five middle-aged people with granola for brains and the maturity of 13-year-olds get themselves into big trouble over very little in this tragicomedy by the always off-center Joel and Ethan Coen ("No Country for Old Men," R, 2007). Some might find the movie mean in its disdain for the clueless. Others (the Family Filmgoer included) will find it very funny. Rarely does such a convoluted plot keep all its strands so visible, yet so deliciously tangled.

Still, this film is best reserved for those 17 and older. Young people with a sophisticated view will better tune in to the film's stylized portrayal of self-absorption and its ironic take on how real life and the secret world of spies exist side-by-side yet don't quite understand each other.

John Malkovich plays Osborne, a pompous CIA analyst who loses his job and decides to write a snarky memoir. His chilly doctor wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a Treasury Department officer, plans to divorce Osborne, assuming Harry will leave his own wife (Elizabeth Marvel) and marry her.

Across town, Linda (Frances McDormand), a health club employee, and her co-worker Chad (Brad Pitt), a dim, gum-chomping personal trainer, come into possession of a DVD that contains Osborne's unfinished memoir. Linda needs money for multiple plastic surgeries, which she thinks will help her stave off middle age and find a man. So she and Chad try to blackmail Osborne. Linda meets Harry via the Internet, and they start an affair, thus putting all five characters on a collision course. J.K. Simmons is great as a laid-back CIA honcho who's completely flummoxed when he hears of these goings-on.

"Burn After Reading" includes two scenes of strong violence, a briefly explicit sexual situation, much implied marital infidelity, a crude sex joke, strong profanity and drinking.

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8 and Older

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"Star Wars: The Clone Wars" (PG). Though it is technically impressive, this computer-animated feature seems pale and antiseptic compared with the live-action "Star Wars" films. The Family Filmgoer was bored at a showing, but kids seemed rapt. Hotheaded Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker (voice of Matt Lanter) is young and still on the good side of the Force in this chapter. His mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), assigns him a teen apprentice, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein). Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) has Jabba the Hutt's (Kevin Michael Richardson) baby son kidnapped and frames the Jedi. At the intergalactic cantina creatures sip strong drinks and do mildly suggestive dancing. Jabba's uncle puffs a hookah. Bloodless battles show androids beheaded. Some creatures are monsterish.

PG-13

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"The House Bunny." Mothers of teenage girls may cringe at this saga of a Playboy bunny who transforms a group of frumpy sorority sisters into campus dollies. Yet "The House Bunny" is too funny, good-natured and smart to feel regressive. While iffy for middle-schoolers, it's okay for high-schoolers. Anna Faris creates a great comic character as Shelley, pushed out of the Playboy Mansion by a rival. As a housemother at Zeta house, she shows the shy, socially inept girls how to dress sexy, flirt and get popular. In return, they give her book-learning. The movie contains a lot of sexual innuendo, bawdy phrases, discussion of the need to lose one's virginity, a comic nearly nude scene, rare profanity, toilet humor, brief drinking by an adult and many skimpy outfits. One of the girls is pregnant and single.

"Traitor." Don Cheadle plays an intriguingly opaque character in this flawed but gripping thriller, which might engage high-schoolers. He portrays an American with Middle Eastern roots who may be a terrorist, a double-agent or a rogue operator. The movie tells a purposely disjointed narrative that doles out information in bits, paralleling how intelligence-gathering paints an incomplete picture. The explosions (some are suicide attacks) and shootouts are too intense for middle-schoolers, though fairly nongraphic in terms of blood. There is profanity and smoking.

R

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