Critic Reviews

• Eddie Cockrell, Variety

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

• Tom Long, Detroit News

  A small gem of an animated film, $9.99 manages to be rich in whimsy and fantastical turns while still rooted in human ground.

• Cary Darling, Dallas Morning News

  It has been a good year for animation that pushes thematic and visual boundaries.

• Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  $9.99 may not be entirely successful from a dramatic perspective, and it certainly offers little enlightenment about the meaning of life. But the film is so intriguing in other ways that it's definitely worth a look.

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  The conclusion is cheerful -- rather than strain for answers, we should just experience the joy of the moment -- but the road to that resolution is jarring.

• Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

  Using the medium of Wallace and Gromit and Gumby, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal turns her clay figures into real people in $9.99, a wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

• Katina Vangopoulos, Moviedex

  After the smooth finish of Mary and Max earlier this year, $9.99 can't match up with its similar dark themes.

• Simon Foster, sbs.com.au

  There is so much to admire about the skill involved in the stop-motion craft, but all films, regardless of their devices, rise or fall on their story, which is abstract and unengaging in $9.99.

• Betsy Sherman, Boston Phoenix

  Director Tatia Rosenthal's inspiration was to populate the proceedings with animated 3-D figures; her cerebral, darkly funny film is a feat of stop-motion rumination.

• Dan Fainaru, Screen International

  Like most episode pieces, Rosenthal and Keret seem to have chosen the easy way out by not taking the trouble to develop any of the ideas beyond the basic anecdote.

• Jason Di Rosso, MovieTime, ABC Radio National

  The film is more than picturesque whimsy, though: at times it reaches for some really quite weird imagery - and some raw honesty.

• Philippa Hawker, The Age (Australia)

  Set in a grim, grimy, often bleak world, a hybrid, densely detailed environment of interwoven stories and chance encounters, with occasional flights of fantasy and rare glimmers of hope.

• Paul Byrnes, Sydney Morning Herald

  The whole never quite comes together, in fact -- but even without that unity, the film has an oddball charm and intelligence.

• Des Partridge, Courier Mail (Australia)

  Think Robert Altman's Short Cuts with clay characters as engaging as human actors, and you might get a sense of what you'll experience.

• Annette Basile, FILMINK (Australia)

  Not for all tastes due to its arthouse nature, this animation transcends into beautiful magical realism with a spectacular Australian voice cast.

• Ed Gibbs, Empire Magazine Australasia

  Playful, light-hearted and fun, with an impressive cast of Aussie stars and some fine stop-motion animation. As it stands, at 74 minutes, it's not quite as smart (or rewarding) as one would hope.

• Andrew L. Urban, Urban Cinefile

  The Jewish melancholy and downbeat humour that oozes from the original writing is overlaid with an Australian idiom, thanks ironically to the great cast, in a transplant that doesn't really take

• Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile

  It's a challenging film with plenty of merit as a handful of unrelated stories criss-cross and involve us in a mountainous thought provoking journey in which we ponder the meaning of happiness

• David Stratton, At the Movies (Australia)

  The creation of this world is amazingly detailed; it's magic, really. But maybe the film doesn't quite reach the heights of everyman experience to which it aspires.

• Sonny Bunch, Washington Times

  $9.99 is consistently amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud funny.

Read all 21 critic reviews