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Critics Consensus: Charlie Kaufman's ambitious directorial debut occasionally strains to connect, but ultimately provides fascinating insight into a writer's mind.
Critic Consensus: Charlie Kaufman's ambitious directorial debut occasionally strains to connect, but ultimately provides fascinating insight into a writer's mind.
All Critics (185) | Top Critics (44) | Fresh (126) | Rotten (59) | DVD (9)
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.
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.
It seems more like an illustration of his script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.
A surreal exploration of art, love and death, it has the Fellini-esque feel of some lost European cinematic masterpiece that reaches far past the normal boundaries of drama and into the very essence of existence.
The more you ruminate on Synecdoche, New York, the more resonance you find in it.
It's a strange trip, to be sure, but a worthwhile one for those willing to take it.
The film very carefully sets up several interesting ideas, but then drops them as too many conflicting ideas become impossible to juggle.
As an example of failure, and delusion, it's fascinating but ultimately frustrating.
Even amid the complexity of his vision, there are moments of searing simplicity and emotional speechlessness that even the most hardened loner among us cannot fail to take to heart.
The movie is ungainly, but to appreciate it one has to swallow the whole purple pill. As inconsistent as it is, it's still more album than mix tape.
Brilliantly imagined and perfectly performed, Synecdoche, New York is so heartbroken and strange that it can be compared only to other Charlie Kaufman films.
An important and intriguing film that must be seen to be believed.
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Super Reviewer
"Synecdoche, New York" is, by all accounts, the nightmare world of Charlie Kaufman's mind. Both writing and directing, Kaufman's inner psyche is so unhinged that the result is a film so insane, so overambitious, so all-reaching and meta that its impossible to not be amazed by it, but its easy to be frustrated by it's all-consuming , baffling, abstract, fragmented wholeness.
You can tell that this film was meticulously drawn out but the final work is hard to comprehend. The film is existential to the max and only lets true scholars understand its true meaning which may make some bitter after watching such a film.
Now watch as Charlie Kaufman disappears up his own arse! With style. Full review later.
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