10 Movies To Challenge Even The Most Hardcore Film Buff

6. Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman had already established himself firmly as a writer of postmodern sensibilities less interested in adhering to conventional approaches to cinema than he is blasting them into a thousand pieces, only to reconfigure them in his own style. This much was apparent in Being John Malkovich and perhaps even more so in Adaptation, a film in which his own writer's block informed a multi-layered story in which fact, fiction and the indistinct line between were scrutinized. Stepping behind the camera for his directorial debut and it is clear that Kaufman desired to take these themes of realism versus reality, identity and authorship to the next level, using the development of an increasingly elaborate stage production as the device to explore these themes. Starring the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a theatre director whose life begins to fall apart after being left by his wife, Synecdoche, New York is as layered as the city in which it is set. Given enough money to stage a new production, he sets out to craft an epic study in the raw brutality of life, but soon finds himself buried deeper beneath a project which spirals out of control, becoming all-consuming. With multiple meanings intricately layered throughout, it is perhaps not surprising that Synecdoche, New York's commercial reception failed to match its critical approval. Whether you view it as a Jungian process of individuation or a meta deconstruction of art and life and the intertwining of the two, it is a movie with stratified meaning, and one which certainly rewards multiple viewings.