‘Burn After Reading’

Desperate times call for desperate movies and “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brothers’ bleak farce about the grasping, murderous dumbness of today is bitterly cathartic. When a disc containing what appears to be classified information is found in a D.C. gym, two bone-headed employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) try to blackmail the CIA operative it belongs to. What they don’t know is that he (John Malkovich) is a middling bureaucrat who has quit in a huff and now spends his days drinking and writing a revenge memoir. Or that they are all disposable in the eyes of the people putatively in charge of their security. Or that paranoia trumps reason every time.