Synecdoche, New York - Movie Reviews (2025)

Synecdoche, New York aches with sentiments on a life (and indeed all life) not fully lived and overly focused on analysis and reflection, offering rich commentary on remorse and alienation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 5, 2023

This takes the notion of life as merely one sprawling play and literalizes it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 15, 2023

Episode 43: The New World / Synecdoche, New York / L'Avventura

Full Review | Original Score: 96/100 | Oct 4, 2021

Kaufman touches upon universal theme of loneliness and melancholy through the eyes of an obsessive artist who builds a replica of life on stage within the replica, within the replica, within the replica... with depth and intimacy.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2021

Unveils many interesting ideas, but the purpose of the film is so rooted amongst ambitious creative chaos that few will understand - or care about - its intentions.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 28, 2020

If you engage with the movie on its own terms then even its oddest, most surreal conceits - such as the home that is permanently on fire - make a weird kind of sense.

Full Review | Nov 22, 2020

Synecdoche, New York is for those who are true cineastes, connoisseurs of cinema who seek more than easy answers, paint-by-number plots and happy endings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 24, 2020

Insufferable auteurist navel-gazing, its "postmodernism" all empty gimmickry to hide an utterly hollow center...

Full Review | Sep 15, 2020

The film goes on too long, but... needs to be seen twice for all the pieces to click.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2020

[W]ith Synecdoche, New York Charlie Kaufman has most certainly turned in one of the most beautifully realised, exquisitely made films of the year. Simply put, it's astonishing.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 31, 2019

Kaufman's absurdly comic, achingly melancholy vision manages to be as universal and as all encompassing as the masterpiece that Caden can never finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 6, 2019

The film very carefully sets up several interesting ideas, but then drops them as too many conflicting ideas become impossible to juggle.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2018

As an example of failure, and delusion, it's fascinating but ultimately frustrating.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2017

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.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2017

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.

Full Review | May 16, 2016

Brilliantly imagined and perfectly performed, Synecdoche, New York is so heartbroken and strange that it can be compared only to other Charlie Kaufman films.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2015

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2011

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 | Oct 27, 2010

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 | Oct 20, 2010