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Bewildered by Being John Malkovich? Entranced by Eternal Sunshine? Be warned: brainmelt master Charlie Kaufman's latest, Synecdoche, new york, is his most confusing yet. Damon Wise is your guideSynecdoche, New York, is two movies for the price of one. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who gave us such hallucinogenic treasures as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, it is another rich, mind-frying treasure trove of weirdness. To the new york Times it is 'one of the best films of the year'. But to the New York Observer, it is 'unspeakable' and 'unpronounceable'.In a way, both papers have a point. On the surface, Synecdoche, New York (pronounced 'si-nek-dakee') is an epic, wilfully obscure, splurge of surrealism that gets stranger and sillier as it goes on. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a playwright whose career gets a boost when he receives a huge arts grant. Cotard's play, he decides, will be so true to real life it literally will be rea

Jon Savage discovers the difference between 1979 and 2009How familiar does this sound? A febrile boom, stimulated by unregulated bank lending, comes to a halt. Unemployment figures go up and a Labour government is forced to implement savage public spending cuts. The mood of the country swings from elation to anxiety, and the Conservatives are preparing for power. Right now, it seems as if the 70s are back. Andy Beckett's survey of British politics during that misunderstood decade recognises this topicality with an epilogue in which he notes the return of such 30-year-old terms as 'stagflation' and 'government bail-out', but events between delivery and publication have made When The Lights Went Out even more relevant than he could have hoped. The 70s already have their retro shorthand - a healthy dollop of Life on Mars with a bit of punk and The Good Life thrown in. However, nostalgia is not history: the former is riddled with cliché, the latter with surprises - such as the fact

Life and love are not so simple, as three couples with six different perspectives discover in the Chicago premiere of Rebecca Gilman's The Crowd You're In With at Goodman Theatre. Wendy C. Goldberg, a frequent Gilman collaborator and artistic director of the acclaimed National Playwrights Conference at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center-where The Crowd You're In With was developed-directs this intimate and relevant new play.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious movie starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Tilda Swinton and Jared Harris.Source: Kathryn E. DardenPublished: May 08, 2009