Rebecca Sinn signs off from Sundance, not without call-outs, predictions, and a screenplay of her own. Paul Giamatti plays himself, and the Internet threatens us all.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/22/09

Some people just don't fit the -formula. But then the formula seems somewhat antithetical to what Charlie Kaufman does. As a screenwriter, he is best known for his two mind-bending collaborations with director Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), and another pair of colorfully inventive films with -director Michel Gondry, Human Nature (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). But the 50-year-old Kaufman seems to have saved his trippiest project for himself: His directorial debut, the recently released Synecdoche, New York, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director whose autonomic functions are, one by one, beginning to shut down as he contends with both his cast and the women in his life, and as he struggles to build a life-size replica of Manhattan as part of his new play.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/25/08