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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

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82
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
82
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82
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82
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
81
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81
Beaches of Agnes, The
80
Food, Inc.
80
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79
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
78
Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
78
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77
Every Little Step
77
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75
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74
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74
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74
Two Lovers
74
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74
Lemon Tree
71
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71
Jerichow
70
Shall We Kiss?
70
Tony Manero
70
End of the Line, The
69
Valentino: The Last Emperor
69
Unmistaken Child
67
$9.99
67
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67
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66
Adoration
66
Moon
65
Sex Positive
65
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64
Outrage
64
Examined Life
64
Throw Down Your Heart
64
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63
Tokyo!
63
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63
Dead Snow
63
Tetro
63
Great Buck Howard, The
62
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62
Not Forgotten
61
Sunshine Cleaning
60
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59
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58
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58
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57
Away We Go
57
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57
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56
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56
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54
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54
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54
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52
Quiet Chaos
50
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48
Alien Trespass
45
Whatever Works
42
Little Ashes
42
Tennessee
40
Limits of Control, The
40
Paris 36
38
Gigantic
36
Life is Hot in Cracktown
35
New York
28
Big Shot-Caller, The
28
Surveillance
22
What Goes Up
18
Downloading Nancy
16
I Hate Valentine's Day
xx
Call of the Wild
xx
Home
xx
Offshore
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Synecdoche, New York
Sony Pictures Classics
 |
|
MPAA RATING: R for language and some sexual content/nudity
Starring
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Dianne Wiest,
Samantha Morton,
Catherine Keener,
Michelle Williams,
Emily Watson,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis,
and
Tom Noonan
Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. (Sony Classics)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Charlie Kaufman
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Charlie Kaufman
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: March 10, 2009
Theatrical: October 24, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
124 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
English | German |

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

100
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.

100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Travis Nichols
Although obviously a stretched and lightly drawn caricature -- the cerebral writer is obsessed with his work, has metaphorical skin problems, can't have sex without weeping, etc. -- Cotard is real. Or as real a representation of an artist as we're likely to get in this biopic age.

100
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
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."

100
Empire
Andrew Male
Astonishing. Kaufman has surpassed himself with a film that will delight and confound. You will want to see it again. And again.

91
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
In effect, Caden's life passes before his eyes while he is living it. And Kaufman shares this effect with us through a strange process he achieves with invisible strings; it's a knockout.

90
Time
Richard Corliss
No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating, a vital affirmation of the creative process.

88
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
It's got more imagination than half a dozen movies combined; there's nothing else out there like this, and to me that's a very good thing.

88
Premiere
Emily Rems
At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year. But for viewers up for the challenge, it may be the film most likely to stick with you.

88
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.

88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.

83
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.

80
NPR
Bob Mondello
Synecdoche, New York is one heck of a head-trip.

75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
You have never seen a movie quite like this one.

70
Film Threat
Mariko McDonald
It is a sprawling, ambitious and very long look at so many things, it's almost a miracle he was able to wrap it up in just two hours. And yet, for a film that is principally about death, the conclusion is surprisingly life-affirming, especially coming from Kaufman.

70
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie.

70
Village Voice
Scott Foundas
Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.

70
The Hollywood Reporter
Ray Bennett
Will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly. It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly.

70
Variety
Todd McCarthy
A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman’s scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multiplane storytelling.

63
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a mesmerizing portrait of the artist as a young, old and middle-aged man.

63
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
In Synecdoche, Kaufman the screenwriter is not well-served by Kaufman the filmmaker. As a director, his propensity for heavyosity leadens rather than leavens this affair.

60
New York Daily News
Joe Neumaier
Hoffman, Morton and Jon Brion's aching score somehow capture the all-too-human need to get things right. If you're in a certain frame of mind, those moments make up for all the stagecraft.

50
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Strives to be a work of greatness. But Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.

50
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Just because a movie is ambitious and challenging doesn't mean it can't also be tedious and at times unbearable.

50
Slate
Dana Stevens
The problem is that the movie's worldview, in the end, isn't expansive enough to justify the (quite literal) stage it takes place on.

50
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman's work, and here it sickens into the morbid.

50
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
The temptation to be emphatic about Synecdoche, New York is overwhelming but should be resisted, because the movie really is a mixed bag. A particularly odd mix.

50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
It seems more like an illustration of his (Kaufman) script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.

50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
Here, there's not much that's funny, there's too much that's too clever by half, and there's not a damn thing that's lively - this is a film about Life whose sin is its lifelessness.

50
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

50
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Watching the film is also wearying, like assembling a puzzle from a box into which a sadist continually pours new pieces. I was still processing details when the abrupt ending snatched the puzzle away.

40
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.

38
USA Today
Claudia Puig
The film disappoints terribly, too. The directorial debut of such an imaginative and clever screenwriter was a highly anticipated event. His "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" are two of the most innovative and intriguing movies of the past decade. Synecdoche is one of the most maddening.

33
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.


The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 110 User Votes
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