I'm a bit behind on these (watching too many episodes of 30 Rock - damn you Maine! 
) and that coupled with a general lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of writing 4-6 paragraphs on either film means I'll double up on them here. Jar City is Iceland's most successful film and is getting the obligatory American remake. It's a functional cop mystery/thriller concerning the body of a man found by the police - finding his killer and exploring the links the victim had to a rape in the 1970s.
The acting is pretty good, nobody truly excels but the ensemble does nice work, especially the lead actor Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson who holds the movie together nicely. It's not without problems, the cross cutting of the storylines is rather muddled and it feels at least half an hour longer than its 90 minute running time. There is, however, an interesting point to it all involving the state keeping personal information, which is an especially relevant topic here. It is quite funny too, which is a nice bonus, this is well worth adding to your online rental queue when it comes out on dvd.
So after that I caught the new Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading and sadly for me (as I'm very hit and miss with them) it was vintage stuff. This is basically a film about how gym-workers Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand come into possession of CIA man John Malkovich's memoirs and try to blackmail him. Acting wise it's very average, only Pitt and a glorified cameo from J.K. Simmons (who got far and away the most consistent laughs in the screening I was at) elevate themselves above the material.
This, like the most disappointing of Coen films, has no idea what it wants to be. It's so infrequently funny it doesn't really work as a comedy and it is frankly not interesting, clever or compelling enough to stand on its own as a drama. What we are left with is this Coen-esque halfbreed which fulfills none of the requirements to make it entertaining enough to be satisfactory. They're persisting with their lazy "tell but don't show after 90 minutes of build up" they went for in No Country for Old Men, the characterisation is weak and the flimsy script (calling it a story would be too generous) is held together by even lazier coincidence. My initial reaction to this was "it's alright", but it just misfires wildly and gets worse the more I think about it. It's had enough of my intellectual time. Lemon out (*cue the music*) ... DAMN YOU MAINE! 