The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of …

Writer and co-director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion animated film is a very fine portrait of the despair at the heart of a comfortable middle-aged white man in America circa right about now. British-born Michael Stone (voiced with great sympathy by David Thewlis) has, by most standards, made it. He lives in …

Charlie Kaufman, scriptwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, drills a new tunnel into his favorite fictional locale, the human brain, this time by way of the science-fictional device of an illicit memory-erasure service called Lacuna, Inc. ("Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage, but …

Highly unusual and no less highly unfunny comedy of Big Themes: animal vs. human, nature vs. civilization, id vs. superego. An ape woman (Patricia Arquette), hairy-chested at the age of twelve, a Queen Kong sideshow act at twenty, a reclusive nature writer as a young adult (best-seller: Fuck Humanity), seems …

Michel Gondry, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and less memorably Human Nature, sets out to demonstrate he can be just as wacky and braintwisty without Charlie Kaufman as his scriptwriter, with, instead, only himself as scriptwriter. The blur of dream and reality demonstrates that, all right, …

The first filmed screenplay of Zach Helm crowds in on the domain of Charlie Kaufman: a Pirandellian brainteaser about a robotic IRS auditor (Will Ferrell, constrained by catatonia) who discovers he is a character in the work-in-progress of a blocked novelist (Emma Thompson) and is slated to die at the …

The erudite title, when pronounced correctly, is an obvious play, not to say a meaningful play, on Schenectady, New York, the main setting of the film, where a regional stage director of high pretension and acute hypochondria gets left behind by his wing-spreading painter wife and their young daughter, then …