Synecdoche, New York Reviews

An important and intriguing film that must be seen to be believed.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The power and tragedy of the love story, or hell, the life story of Caden Cotard will become a part of you, because it is your story, and his story is yours, and back and forth and so on and on because 'everyone's everyone'.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Art is a dream through which some seek to rise above the mundane. "Synecdoche" is the nightmare of succumbing further to the mundane via art. What could be inaccessible is instead gloriously indispensable - a confounding & combative, but great, film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

The line between reality and imagination, possibility and pipe-dream, become immaterial, and the film becomes the overflowing contents of a fertile mind spilled out all across the screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.6/10

His directorial debut is a remarkably deep and rich film, somewhat daunting upon first showing, challenging the audience to take in this complex movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Inaccessible and endlessly frustrating, Synecdoche is replete with art-house pomposity and the type of muddled profundity one sees in an introductory philosophy seminar.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Every scene is pitched at the highest level and acted accordingly.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Kaufman, who once dazzled us with his japester's invention, uses those same tools to do something else here. He leaves us reeling.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

This is a classic Kaufmanesque work: bold, bizarre and utterly baffling.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

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.

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Synecdoche, New York finally feels bitter, hollow and adolescent: like a gargantuan music video conceived for an emo band with a penchant for Pirandello.

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Synecdoche (pronounced Sih-neck-doh-kee, by the way) is beautifully acted throughout, scripted by Kaufman with the same valorous unorthodoxy as his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and shot with real panache.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Somehow, because it resists unlocking, it feels more serious, troubling, significant. It's as funny as it's depressing. It's as brilliant as it is baffling.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/6

A soul-altering, heart-changing, brain-transplanting masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

A toweringly ambitious and bafflingly confusing film that gives a glimpse of the daily battles going on in the director's mind.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

A difficult, maddening and elusive film that's also intriguing, profound and darkly funny.

| Original Score: 3/5

For too long Caden (and Kaufman) are raising big issues and only grasping at the edges, which makes the film frustrating to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Like the play within the film, Synecdoche is bravely ambitious, with glimpses of Kaufman's genius. But it's also an indulgent slog that only the most diehard Kaufmanites will happily endure.

| Original Score: 2/5

It seems churlish to overly criticise. Kaufman's daring, ambition and frequent moments of beauty and sadness are worth the overindulgence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5