IFP Week: 'Devil All The Time,' 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' Panels Among Public Programming

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.

true story behind the Robert Zemeckis credit in i'm thinking of ending things: Kaufman never wrote a name in the script so the assistant editor used the end credit from CONTACT as a placeholder. When Kaufman saw it he burst out laughing, and asked Zemeckis’ permission to keep it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Charlie Kaufman knows he has a reputation for being, well, a bit out there. Maybe it comes from having such a wildly original, meta style, cooking up movies where people step into the mind of John Malkovich or figure out a way to erase a failed romance from their memory.

Even if the TV shows at the network aren’t to your liking, there’s no one out there that could argue that CW doesn’t take chances. Before Marvel TV was making all those superhero TV series, CW had already seen “Arrow” become a hit and kickstart a highly successful universe.