Anomalisa

In order to become fully realized on film, the harsh metaphysical whimsy of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman requires an equally visionary visual artist. Many critics loved Kaufman’s 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, but I could never get past the film’s pushy message-mongering and lead-footed visual sense, and felt that he deeply missed the cinematic panache of directors like Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). In the strange and pensive stop-motion animated mind-blower Anomalisa, Kaufman finds another visionary collaborator in co-director Duke Johnson, best known for his work on Moral Orel. Kaufman and Johnson’s film is a heart-stopping masterpiece of emotional malaise and disconnection, vividly surreal and achingly real at the same time. D.B.