‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Director Charlie Kaufman Isn’t Trying to Mess With Your Mind

Christos Nikou was there at the start of the Greek Weird Wave as the assistant director on Yorgos Lanthimos' dark comedy Dogtooth (2009), the movie that launched the absurdist cinema movement partly inspired by the chaos in Greece triggered by the global financial crisis. More than a decade later, Nikou is adding his own twist to the movement with his assured directorial debut.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorWhen “Cold War” cinematographer Łukasz Żal teamed with writer-director Charlie Kaufman on “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” one of the earliest conversations they had was how to communicate memory visually. In Kaufman’s new film, based on the novel by Iain Reid, Jesse Plemons as Jake and Jessie Buckley (“Wild Rose”) as his meta-named Girlfriend go on a long road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm. Girlfriend questions everything.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage, and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Mike Fleming Jr Co-Editor-in-Chief, FilmEXCLUSIVE: Robert De Niro, Colson ‘Machine Gun Kelly’ Baker, and John Malkovich are set to star in Wash Me In The River, a drama that will mark the second directorial outing of Randall Emmett. Emmett, who just re-started production on Midnight in the Switchgrass after halting five days in because of the pandemic last March, has a week left to go.

SPOILERS AHEAD!Jessie plays an unnamed woman who reluctantly agrees to meet the parents of her new boyfriend Jake, despite not being too sure about the future of their romance.However, when she gets to their home things take a dark turn and she quickly plunges into an unsettling psychological spiral.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Netflix's haunting and unclassifiable art film from writer-director Charlie Kaufman, is not a movie that tells you exactly what it's about. It doesn't have a cause-and-effect plot, and the story moves according to dream logic.

Lately, it feels like every movie has us thinking, “What the f*ck did I just watch?” In this series, we will break down exactly what happened in all those wild, mind-bendy, and just plain strange flicks…in a way that’s much easier to understand than the actual film.Like I mentioned, the movie follows an unnamed girl (who is sometimes called "Lucy," but not all the time) when she goes to meet and have dinner with her new boyfriend Jake's parents.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things has a deceptively simple premise: Boy meets girl. Boy takes girl to meet parents.

Clayton Davis Netflix has given a platform to various voices in the Hollywood industry such as Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma”), Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), and most recently Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”), in which filmmakers get to bring their distinct visions to life with the autonomy they wouldn’t be afforded at a traditional studio.

another film with a knotty plot out this week, this one was fun to untangle.Kaufman started taking on directing duties with 2008’s “Synecdoche, New York,” and his relative simplicity here compared to the stylings of his previous collaborators Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry allows magic moments to pop out of nowhere.He makes “Ending Things” into a screen version of the immersive off-Broadway play “Sleep No More,” whisking us into seemingly normal rooms in which otherworldly scenes hazily play

“I try to imbue my work with a sort of interiority,” says Lucy (Jessie Buckley), the artists-physics student-girlfriend of Charlie Kaufman's “I'm Thinking of Ending Things.”The line could hardly describe Kaufman better, all the more so because it’s spoken by a character that may or may not be a figment of subconsciousness. No film writer has more regularly made his home inside the brain, treating the labyrinthine corridors of thought like sets to be peopled.

For a while now, especially during the promotion of the upcoming film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” filmmaker Charlie Kaufman has consistently discussed the idea that he might be done with directing. While the idea of him not directing features anymore is a bit worrisome for film fans, Kaufman explained in a recent interview with UPROXX why it is the issues that go along with releasing a film that has led him to this point of just not caring if he makes another or not.

The list of American screenwriters who have attained name-brand status in the last thirty years is a relatively short one. It used to be that the writer was king in Hollywood; the advent of the so-called auteur theory effectively quelled that notion.

Charlie Kaufman is unlike any other creative force in the business. One only needs to look at his resume and you’ll see, both as a writer as well as a director, that he’s a singular talent.

Charlie Kaufman’s peculiarly inviting psychodrama “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” feels so enclosed that you could almost swear it was set inside a snow globe. With one gentle shake, gaudy conversations on vast existential notions shower its cozy, wintery mood one minute, only to somehow thin out and ephemerally disappear the next before you could luxuriate in their gloomy mystery.

Kevin Hart tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this year (2020).The Jumanji: The Next Level star spoke about his diagnosis as he performed at Dave Chappelle’s An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair show in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and told guests at the event: “The problem is that I had it around the same time as Tom Hanks, and I couldn’t say anything because he’s more famous than I am.”Hanks and wife Rita Wilson announced on Instagram in March that they’d both tested positive for COVID-19, after

For more than two decades now, Charlie Kaufman has been examining the tricky wiring of the human mind in an eclectic yet tightly cohesive body of screen work ranging across several lauded screenplays and three more he directed himself. His films are teasing puzzles marked by surreal detours and jarring rips in the fabric of reality.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the new movie written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, opens with an extended road-trip sequence in which a young woman (Jessie Buckley) — she’s identified in the credits simply as the Young Woman — drives through a country snowstorm with Jake (Jesse Plemons), her boyfriend of six weeks, to meet his parents at their Oklahoma farmhouse.