Every horror buff knows that dolls can be eerie, but Anomalisa suggests that perhaps they're no eerier than people. The upsettingly brilliant new film from Charlie Kaufman stars an entire toy box's worth of the things: it's a stop-motion animation, and its characters are soft-skinned, bright-eyed mannequins, made out of metal and rubber and glass.They're so perfectly crafted, and move with such delicacy and precision, that they almost - almost - look alive.That crucial almost is where Kaufman's story makes it nest. Anomalisa, which Kaufman co-directed with Duke Johnson, is about Michael Stone, a customer- services guru voiced by a perfectly cast David Thewlis, who flies into Cincinnati one night to present at a small-business conference the following morning.He checks into the Hotel Fregoli in the middle of town - that's Fregoli as in ''Fregoli delusion", the psychiatric disorder that causes the sufferer to believe everyone else in the world but them is somehow the same person - and immediately retreats to his room in search of peace.No wonder. Everyone Michael meets has exactly the same voice: an affectless, margariney blither, performed in each instance by Tom Noonan. What makes the voice so horrible is its essential unhorribleness. It's what customer services sounds like.The premise is classic Kaufman: an existential cup-and-ball trick entirely in keeping with his previous work, which includes the screenplays for Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. But nothing can prepare you for its sheer flesh-creeping oddness.So when a different voice passes the door of Michael's hotel room it comes as almost as much of a shock to you as it does to Michael. That voice belongs to Lisa (an outstanding Jennifer Jason Leigh), who's come to town for the conference with her friend Emily (Tom Noonan, again). Michael feels compelled to find out what makes her anomalous, and what this might mean for him, and so he buys her cocktails and then they go back to his room, where he listens to her talk, and talk, and sing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, in an astonishing sequence that flicks from devastating to hilarious at light-switch speed. And then they make love, in the greatest and perhaps only explicit puppet sex scene since Team America: World Police.If Anomalisa had been a live-action film, the moment would have been just as raw and honest and touchingly funny. But the stop-motion adds an extra existential flavour: it makes the inescapable strangeness of the way in which human bodies negotiate space and each other dumbfoundingly apparent.Not much else happens (the film is only 90 minutes long, and has the jigsaw-tight construction of a great short story). Yet in the limited activity that follows - a fitful night, a hopeful morning after, the conference itself, and an ambiguous epilogue - Kaufman and Johnson tease out the possible causes and effects of Michael's crisis with great imagination, tilting your sympathies so subtly as they do so that you don't even feel it going on.So when the film's ending arrives - a dazzling, dust-light mini-monologue by Leigh - it hits you like a vase of water to the face, snapping you out of a narcotised dream-state.What others sayAlmost unbearably poignant at some times and downright nightmarish at others. Mike D'Angelo, A.V. ClubAS haunting and hypnotic an R-rated love story for grown-ups as you'll see anywhere. Peter Travers, rollingstone.comSomething different that is best tolerated by cinema buffs who can pass it off as experimental.Mal Vincent, pilotonline.comAlso openingZOOTROPILISA colourful, creative and charming animated film, full of wit and invention, about a country-bumpkin rabbit who comes to live in a city populated by jungle animals. James Mottram, the national.aePRIDE & PREJUDICE & ZOMBIESPride and Prejudice and Zombies is unwieldy horror-comedy - delivering an amusing but gimmicky blend of Regency-era romance and zombie mythology. Ben Kendrick, Screen RantLONDON HAS FALLENIt's why people complain about sequels. And, in this instance, they're absolutely right to. Simon Brew, denofgeek.com..