Synecdoche; New York is a beautiful indulgence in one's deepest existential anxieties. Charlie Kaufman mashes age, death, space, love, grief, and family together to create an abstract, maximalist reality completely governed by deep fears and the various weights of living.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is able to portray the grossest parts of us in what may be his greatest performance in an endless array of great performances. He evokes visceral disgust and sympathy in the way he lets his life pass…
Power, legacy, control. It's no surprise that an artist would gravitate towards these themes, but what is a surprise is that this artist, Brady Corbet, had such a monumental achievement of filmmaking in him. This is by all means THE film of the year, and it's absolutely astonishing that such a deep work of art was created with a budget of $10,000,000 and took only 30 days to shoot. Every single element, from the looming sets, to the cinematic vistavision…
I was on board with this for most of its runtime, the premise was intriguing in spite of its tropes, Ayo Edebiri is a surprisingly solid horror star, and John Malkovich is just an amazing casting choice for the enigmatic pop icon Moretti. It's really during the climax and everything that follows it that the movie takes a drastic nosedive. It feels like the filmmakers didn't have an ending in mind and they just wanted to wrap it up as…
Obviously this is super cool but James Franco probably deserves at most a C on this film class project.
It makes my blood boil that the killers were around to give their ignorant side of the story in their cozy homes while obviously Vincent was not. Imagine tailing someone to mercilessly beat them with a baseball bat and later calling it an "accident." Every scene with Vincent's mother was heartbreaking and this entire narrative was outrageous.
