Using the droll, wise stories of Etgar Keret as her guide, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal concocts an artful film that expresses deep thoughts, lightly.

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

A movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that's a key part of the joke.

It's an entertaining, depressing and ultimately hopeful movie about the times we live in.

Keret's alternately sweet and bitter sense of humor comes through clearly in $9.99, via warm voicework by vets like Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia.

Fans of deadpan comic fantasy writers like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut are likely to be intrigued by this lively little packet of weird -- then dive like a dolphin into Keret's loopy story volumes.

Though $9.99 manages to be quirky and enigmatic, it is in the end too self-conscious, too satisfied in its eccentricity, to achieve the full mysteriousness toward which it seems to aspire. It is odd, curious, intermittently intriguing but ultimately more interesting for its artifice than for its art.

The stop-motion animated puppets in Tatia Rosenthal's beguiling first feature look like clay-mated slabs of glazed meat, at once unreal and hyper-real.

There is something undeniable hypnotic and bewitching about Tatia Rosenthal's $9.99, which if nothing else is a candidate for the most unusual film of 2008.

A charming, poetic and at times surreal stop-motion animation co-written with Etgar Keret and based on the Israeli writer's short stories.

A deliberately coarse character style that's more Gumby than Gromit.

Less than the sum of its parts. The connective tissue of its episodes and set pieces -- some of which pack a memorable punch -- is not a compelling story line but the painterly physicality of the movie's stop-motion animation.