London’s Lords of Spin

At the beginning of "In the Loop"—British director Armando Ianucci's first feature film, set in a thinly disguised, not-so-distant past—hardliners in London and Washington are pressing for war. But behind the backstabbing politicians and the scheming military generals, a much nastier breed of political creature pulls the strings of power: the out-of-control spin doctors who bully ministers and happily distort facts to strengthen the country's murky case for conflict.

Ianucci's feature is political satire at its sharpest—the film's foulmouthed principal villain is modeled on Tony Blair's (in)famous director of communications, Alastair Campbell—and it perfectly gets the pitch of Britain's sound-bite political culture. The low-budget film has been winning rave reviews from critics since its mid-April release, which happened to coincide with the latest U.K. political scandal: a spinmaster close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown was plotting a highly personal and very nasty smear campaign against leading Conservative rivals and their families. That's the thing about art imitating life, imitating art—it's funny on the big screen, until it shows up on the evening news.