Sean Nam

For all its congratulatory spirit, the film has the persistent feeling of an elegy bidding adieu to a bygone time.

Atom Egoyan is only interested in using the Holocaust as fodder for carrot-dangling plot contrivances.

The absence of a central narrator for the most part prevents the film from devolving into gratuitous pedagogy.

It's to Britni West's credit that she's yoked the film's experimental sequences with the hard reality of characters trying to figure things out.

Writer-director Daniel Peddle's anthropological concerns never really wed themselves to a sturdy narrative bedrock.

The moody lighting and the ubiquity of deciduous trees provide a canvas for bracing drama, but the film undoes itself by its desire to impart revelatory history lessons.

If the film were to propose a mandate for animation, it would be what the medium's etymology has longed suggested: to make the inanimate full of life.