DVD: Synecdoche, New York, For retail & rental (Revolver)

Charlie Kaufman's first film as both writer and director is so bizarre that it makes his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine... look like Richard Curtis rom coms.

It begins as a low-key, deadpan midlife-crisis comedy, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a morose theatre director, but it spirals and sprawls into a byzantine meditation on art, parenthood, loneliness, ageing and mortality. Kaufman-esque is the only word for it.