12 Movies That Tried Too Hard To Innovate (And Sucked Anyway)

Is Synecdoche, New York the most pretentious movie ever made? Quite possibly.

This postmodern drama, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman in his directional debut, concerns Caden (the late, dearly-missed Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a theatre director, who stages a ridiculously ambitious theatre project in which involves creating a fake city inside a warehouse and getting a large cast to live out constructed lives.

This was a great premise, but this entire film is just ludicrous. An incomprehensible combo of motifs, symbols, surrealism and convoluted themes, this is a depressing, excruciatingly dull, nauseatingly arrogant and unbelievably pretentious meditation on.... something?

This is so lost and in love with its own big ideas and so over-the-top in its attempts to be unique and clever that it loses any sense of coherence, likeability or any true emotional depth. This approach further damaged the film by making it confusing to the point where none of its themes really came through. So, not only is this possibly the most pretentious film of all time, but it's one of the most insufferable films ever made.