$9.99

First-time director Tatia Rosenthal helmed this unusual feature film, which brings together the short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret in a stop-motion animated production employing Australian voice performers, including Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia. The central character is twentysomething slacker Dave (voiced wonderfully by Samuel Johnson), who is still living with his parents. After Dave happens upon a $9.99 booklet that promises to reveal the meaning of life, he is eager to share the publication's insights with the neighbors in his apartment complex, which brings him into contact with a skein of eccentrics and otherworldly types that include an elderly man who turns into a belligerent angel, an underachiever visited by a trio of two-inch-tall inebriates, a little boy who bonds a little too strongly with his piggy bank, and a would-be magician who is unable to keep the real world from crashing into his life. While the film's ingenious use of clay figurines provides a welcome visual respite from the current cinematic obsession with CGI animation, Keret's oddball stories do not easily lend themselves to adaptation, with much of $9.99 coming across as a wobbly mix of whimsy and fatalism. Optional. (P. Hall)