Critics reviews

Anyway, this is a movie designed to provoke, entertain and infuriate, that boldly goes into areas where few films from the English-speaking world nowadays dare penetrate.

The film is either a masterpiece or a massively dysfunctional act of self-indulgence and self-laceration. It has brilliance, either way: surreal, utterly distinctive, witty, gloomy in the manner that his fans will recognise and adore, but with a new epic confidence, absorbing the influences of Fellini and Lynch.

[W]orlds away from the takeaway insights in most merely good films, and it's expressed so originally in the movie's closing passages that your respect for Kaufman soars sky-high. The acting, particularly from Hoffman, Samantha Morton and Emily Watson as a pair of interchangeable PAs, and Dianne Wiest as a testy actress who turns up late in the day, gets behind the writer-director's ideas and gives them both spring and gravity.

Astonishing. Kaufman has surpassed himself with a film that will delight and confound. You will want to see it again. And again.

Synecdoche is the kind of movie that rewards repeated viewings. But sometimes, as Van Morrison sings, it’s just best to “sail into the mystic.”

Synecdoche, New York is a huge film about puny sentiments, an anti-heroic epic of failure, remorse, alienation, and self-pity. It may not be the best film of the year, but it is very likely to be the most extraordinary.

"Synecdoche, New York" is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play... Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It's all a play. The play is real.

Charlie Kaufman’s wildly ambitious directorial debut... [is a] sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called “Being Charlie Kaufman” or, better yet, “Being Anybody.”

When a takeaway message finally emerges from the film's mad swirl of images, memories, and ideas, it seems to add up to little more than, yeah, people are kind of lame once you get to know them. Or possibly, as an actor playing a priest intones over a fake grave in the play-within-a-movie, "Fuck everybody."

Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies.

There’s a hint of self-satire in the way that Caden overcomplicates things, but Kaufman seems to have acquired Woody Allen’s suspiciousness of comedy, and Hoffman is so dedicated to his character’s mopiness that he sucks the air out of the frame. It’s a bummer when your hero seems born to succumb.