$9.99

Opening this weekend: $9.99, directed by Tatia Rosenthal

Synopsis from the New York Times website:

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. This effect is doubled by the extraordinary technique used in $9.99 to bring Mr. Keret’s world to life. Ms. Rosenthal, an Israeli animator, has cast some of Australia’s finest actors, including well-known performers like Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia, to provide voices for figures made of modeling clay.

The film has its own cute but frustrating-to-navigate website.

Interview with Tatia Rosenthal here.