2 1/2 stars = Average
Ratings explained

Even the press materials acknowledge this is "a film with a title only English teachers understand and almost no one can pronounce." It's Sih-NECK-doh-kee, and that observation is right on both counts.

"Synecdoche," a takeoff on Schnectady and a figure of speech, is never uttered in the movie, which sprang from the brain of Charlie Kaufman. He also gave us the brilliant but bizarre "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," among others.

In those cases, he had a director to reel him back to Earth; here, he directs his own screenplay, and he's like an astronaut who loses his tether in outer space and drifts farther and farther away, leaving some moviegoers behind.

In "Synecdoche," the always excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theater director whose health, marriage and world start to collapse, prompting him to use a MacArthur Grant to take over a warehouse where he re-creates not only the streets of New York but his life, complete with stand-ins. Attention must be paid, indeed, to borrow a line from "Death of a Salesman," which he stages early in the film.

With a cast that includes Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams and Emily Watson, "Synecdoche" explores the notions of the passage of time, being the star or an extra in your own life and art imitating life, complete with doppelgangers.

At one point, Hoffman's character says, "I don't know why I make it so complicated," and his then-wife responds, "That's what you do." And that's what the ambitious Kaufman does, to the admiration and bewilderment of the audience.

R for language and some sexual content/nudity. Opens today at the Manor.

-- Barbara Vancheri

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

The title sounds like a cozy bedtime story, but this is an adaptation of the John Boyne novel about the forbidden friendship between two 8-year-old boys -- one the son of a Nazi officer, the other a prisoner in an extermination camp.

Young, naive Bruno thinks Shmuel is wearing striped pajamas and lives on a "farm" he can spot from the window of the home he shares with his commandant-father (David Thewlis), mother (Vera Farmiga) and older sister. Bruno, who fancies himself an explorer and keenly misses the friends he left in Berlin before the family's move, is lonely, bored and isolated, and thrilled to find a possible friend within walking distance.

A tutor tries to indoctrinate him, but Bruno asks, with an open heart and mind, "There is such a thing as a nice Jew, isn't there?" Bruno sneaks away from the family compound and meets Shmuel, on the other side of the barbed wire, but their friendship takes an unforeseen, tragic turn.

Directed and adapted by Mark Herman, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" presents a continuum of characters who range from blessed innocence and ignorance to craven complicity in Hitler's "Final Solution."

Although Boyne intended his novel as a fable, the movie imparts its vital lesson and then seems to bash us over the head to ensure we're properly stunned. Doing, thinking and believing the right thing should carry some reward but here, those actions become cudgels.

Rated PG-13 for some mature thematic material involving the Holocaust. Opens at the Manor and SouthSide Works Cinema.

-- Barbara Vancheri