Synecdoche, New York

Complex and confounding, Synecdoche, New York is a marvellous mess. It's a film that demands a kind of openness in order to engage with it, and a willingness to read it in a way that doesn't involve a search for conventional closure or explanations, but the rewards that it offers when grappled with on its own terms are considerable (which is not to say that it wouldn't benefit considerably from a second watching). Of course, Kaufman's complicatedly unspooling and ramifying structures and deconstructions of reality, art and the self wouldn't have been worth a damn as a film without the sterling work of his cast, and Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a performance that provides the rock around which everything else is built in a role which demands that formal stability while portraying a character who is unstable in every other way possible (not least being seemingly unstuck in time in at least some relevant respects); the others are inevitably in his shade, but not by much (also, I think this is the only film in which my two reigning cinematic crushes, Emily Watson and JJL have both featured). It's wildly ambitious, and I wasn't left with the feeling that everything could be neatly tied together if one just thought hard enough about it; I also wasn't left with the feeling that it would have been the point at all to attempt such a tying together. I don't yet know how good the film is, but it's certainly no disappointment.