"In the Loop" is one of the best political comedies since the invention of the sprocket hole. A fast, furious, foulmouthed farce, it's packed with irredeemable hypocrites, hacks, schemers and milquetoasts stumbling into a war based on sham intelligence. "Whether it happened or not," one power player barks, "it's true." The bureaucrats are less concerned with body counts than their own ambitions; war is the logical extension of interoffice combat. This is bruising, blistering, breathtaking gallows humor of the highest order.

Written and directed by British comedy kingpin Armando Iannucci, the film revolves around Simon Foster, a gaffe-prone Minister for International Development toiling away on problems like Third World diarrhea. He trips over his tongue during a broadcast interview, announcing that despite rumblings between the United States and an unnamed Mideast nation, "war is unforeseeable."

That bland statement throws Britain's war policy into question, and Foster into the jaws of the prime minister's Rottweiler press secretary, Malcolm Tucker. With a profane tirade that would make David Mamet blush, Tucker whips Foster back in step with the party line ("War is neither foreseeable nor unforeseeable"). Foster does his best to digest this doublethink, but his feckless attempts to clarify push him further into the spotlight.

In Washington, D.C., Foster looks useful to State Department undersecretary Karen Clark, a dove whose administration allies include a U.S. Army general with pacifist views and anger-management issues. When Foster is summoned to a meeting of the top-secret war committees to bolster their position, he's warned by a colleague, "They're all kids in Washington. It's like 'Bugsy Malone' but with real guns." The film's rat-a-tat dialogue is a screwball delight, and everyone is a fat, juicy target.

The film is made with superb attention to detail; the office art of each character, barely glimpsed, tells volumes about their personalities. Handheld documentary-style camerawork imparts a sense of instability, but the actors are never off their marks or their A-game. Tom Hollander, the preening villain of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, plays Foster as a decent chap who has the misfortune to have been born without a spine. Peter Capaldi makes Tucker a whirling dervish of spleen, profanity and Machiavellian guile. He's a character that is impossible to like, yet Capaldi compels our admiration with his sheer venomous audacity. Mimi Kennedy (of TV's "Dharma and Greg") shines as Undersecretary Clark, a spinster policy wonk with a longtime crush on James Gandolfini's bellicose peacenik military man. And David Rasche is a sinister delight as an armchair hawk who keeps a live grenade as a paperweight.

"In the Loop" is the best comedy of the year so far, because it all rings so chillingly true.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186