The most ambitious American movie of the year, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial début inveigles us into mindgames even more slippery than his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If you ever feared Kaufman risked becoming too ingenious for his own good, you may be gratified to hear that he’s aware there’s a problem: he’s made acute self-awareness the subject and the butt of this extraordinary black comedy.

The title, which refers to the figure of speech where a part (a hearth) connotes the whole (a home) is also a play on the sound-alike name of the town of Schenectady, NY, where the movie’s protagonist, Caden Cotard, a prickly, neurotic theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, lives with his wife (Catherine Keener at her flinty best), and their daughter. Fretting obsessively about failure, bodily decay and the end of the world, Hoffman is incapacitated by his own gloomy intelligence. He is nonetheless deemed the worthy recipient of a ‘genius’ award to mount an epic theatrical production of his own devising. For his subject he chooses his own sorry life, building a vast replica of Manhattan for a set and folding layer upon layer of art upon reality upon art... until, after years in production, the difference between the women in his life and the women playing the women in his life is as indistinguishable as the difference between the writer/director and the men impersonating him on stage. Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Emily Watson are on hand to ensure that the confusion is vividly populated.

“The very title Synecdoche, New York is off-putting. Like a genius lunatic wandering the streets, it seems to scream, ‘I’m weird and difficult! Stay away!’ But I say, it’s weird and wonderful. Go!... Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it’s one that – thanks in large part to a superb cast, led by Hoffman’s unsparing, sympathetic, towering performance – should delight viewers who both work the movie out and surrender to its spell.” — Richard Corliss, Time

“Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad... Synecdoche, New York is beautiful.” — Carina Chocano, LA Times