$9.99 (2008)

[lsanderson]

A scene from “$9.99,” an animated film by Tatia Rosenthal. Barry Otto provides the voice of the character on the left, Geoffrey Rush the one on the right.
June 19, 2009
Figures Made of Clay in an Imaginary World
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 19, 2009

The Israeli writer Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom. When such vignettes are strung together into a feature — as in “Jellyfish” (2007), which he directed with his wife, Shira Geffen, and now in Tatia Rosenthal’s “$9.99” — they become even more elusive and strange. To watch these films is to enter an eerily realistic parallel universe where people and emotions are at once perfectly recognizable and completely bizarre. More