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Review

A star rating of 5 out of 5.

Charlie Kaufman's exquisitely sad, strange, and achingly humane film, made entirely with animated puppets, isn't quite like anything you've ever seen before. Customer-service pundit Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) arrives in Cincinnati to give a talk at a conference. Everyone around him looks like they were fabricated from the same mould and speaks with the same voice (that of Tom Noonan). The only exception, apart from Michael, is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a young woman who doesn't think of herself as especially different except for the fact that she feels ashamed of a facial scar. But to Michael, a man bored with the sameness surrounding him, Lisa is a transcendent, beautiful anomaly. Like Kaufman's previous work - he wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and wrote and directed {italSynecdoche, New York - Anomalisa deploys a fantastical device in an otherwise quotidian setting, with this kink in the fabric of a fictional reality revealing a deeper weirdness in the world we normally take for granted. There's no trite, easily extractable take-home message here but somehow the film says something very profound about the repetitiveness of relationships, and our need to believe that we and our loved ones are unique and special.

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Credits

Cast

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Michael StoneDavid Thewlis
LisaJennifer Jason Leigh
Everyone elseTom Noonan

Crew

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DirectorCharlie Kaufman
DirectorDuke Johnson

Details

Theatrical distributor
Curzon Artificial Eye
Released on
2016-03-11
Languages
English | Japanese | Italian
Guidance
Swearing, sex scenes, nudity.
Available on
DVD and Blu-ray
Formats
Colour
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