For the last few years, Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International have been expertly taking the ten nominated films for the Oscar for Short Film: Live Action & Animation and presenting them in two theatrical programs for separate admissions. The lineup is currently playing at the Music Box in Chicago and in theatres in New York and Los Angeles and is expanding to 60 cities throughout the country in the following weeks. Together with the theatrical run, the nominated short films will be released on iTunes on February 17th on iTunes stores in the US, UK, and Canada. If you can get out and see them, you should. Most are better than The Reader. And, even if you can't, perhaps this review will help you win that Oscar office pool or give you a heads up on which shorts to track down in the future. Some of them are truly spectacular. In alphabetical order...

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ACADEMY AWARD-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: LIVE ACTION

Auf Der Streck (On the Line) - Directed by Reto Caffi - 30 minutes

Several major motion pictures have been developed from short films including Bottle Rocket, Memento, and Sling Blade. It's incredibly easy to see the excellent On the Line turning into a critically acclaimed feature film. The set-up is fantastic. A lonely security officer at a department store has a crush on a bookstore employee. He watches her on his camera and times his leaving work with hers so they'll be on the same train going home. One day, she gets on the train with what he thinks is her boyfriend and after a fight, she storms off. A group of thugs starts to harass the "other man" and the protagonist has to decide whether to step in or get off at the next stop. A tragic tale of regret, loneliness, and longing, On the Line is easily the second best live action short in the program and I wouldn't be surprised if it won the Oscar and/or was turned into a feature in the very near future. There's more than enough dramatic potential in here to support a film three times as long. Bone Rating: Three and a Half Bones.

New Boy - Directed by Steph Green - 11 minutes

Steph Green's New Boy is based on a short story by Roddy Doyle (The Commitments, The Snapper) about a nine-year-old African boy named Joseph who transfers from his war-torn country to his first day in class in Ireland. Joseph left a positive school environment taught by his own father for a world of strict rules, bullies, and misbehaving children. Green intercuts a withdrawn Joseph taking in the scenery in his Irish classroom with memories of a happy Joseph in Africa. New Boy is a modest film without big revelations or moments but it feels a little too light. The child actors don't register as believable as they should and the story never comes together to warrant even a ten-minute running time. Green and Doyle have interesting ideas about two very different classroom experiences, but New Boy isn't memorable enough to be effective. Bone Rating: Two and a Half Bones.

Toyland - Directed by Jochen Freydank - 14 minutes

Jochen Freydank's harrowing Toyland is about a German mother in the early days of WWII with a son who is close to the Jewish boy who lives next door. When the Jewish family finds out they're being taken away, they try to soften the blow to the German boy by telling him that his friend is merely taking a ride to "Toyland". Of course, he wants to go to Toyland too. What could have been manipulative melodrama is actually very effectively done as we see the mother trying to find her son on the morning the Jews were taken away and flashbacks to the day before. It doesn't end how you think it would and has a quiet, emotional resonance that's often missing from films set during the Holocaust. Bone Rating: Three Bones.

The Pig - Directed by Tivi Manusson and Dorte Hogh - 22 minutes

The least successful entry of the ten nominated shorts, The Pig is a very unusual story about an old man in a hospital room who becomes obsessed with a painting of a pig on his wall. What he thinks will be a routine surgery to remove an abscess in his rectum turns darker when he fears he may have cancer and the older gentleman finds peace and contentment in the painting of the pig. When a Muslim man comes to share the room with him, cultures clash and the pig painting comes down, forcing the gentleman to fight for the one thing he's held on to in what could be his final days. The idea that we can grasp at anything, even a pig painting, for comfort in our darkest hours is a good one, but The Pig feels twice its running time and never connected for me emotionally or comically. Bone Rating: Two Bones.

Manon on the Asphalt - Directed by Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont - 15 minutes

The best of the live-action shorts is an emotionally complex film about a woman named Manon who gets in a tragic bike accident. With an amazing interior monologue visualized by the expert directors, Manon imagines what will happen next - the phone calls to loved ones, the friends gathering and sharing memories about her, the life she wishes she would have had with her boyfriend but now won't be able to fulfill. In just fifteen minutes, Marre and Pont have made a film more emotionally resonant than several of the full-length Oscar nominees of the year. It's memorable, mesmerizing, and poetically beautiful. Bone Rating: Four Bones.

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ACADEMY AWARD-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: ANIMATION

Lavatory-Love Story - Directed by Konstantin Brozit - 10 minutes

This Russian animated short is my least favorite of the five animated nominees, a mostly black-and-white tale of a lonely, middle-aged woman in charge of a public lavatory. As men walk by the turnstile in front of her, she reads about the happiness of other people in the paper and longs for her own. One day, flowers appear in her change jar and she thinks one of the lavatory users may have fallen in love with her and made her dreams come true. Lavatory-Love Story is genuinely sweet and kind-hearted but feels a bit too whimsical to me. It actually might have been more effective at half the running time. Bone Rating: Two and a Half Bones.

Oktapodi - Directed by Julien Bocabelle - 3 minutes

Cute, clever, and funny, Oktapodi is about an octopus separated from the tank she shares with her octopus-mate and packed into a cooler, presumably, to be taken for someone's dinner. Her partner is not about to give up without a fight and he chases after her, grabbing on to the truck, and leading to a series of very funny physical moments in a brief under 180-second running time. With CGI imagery, Oktapodi is proof that there are going to be interesting voices using this technology outside of the big dogs like Pixar and Dreamworks. A bit too short to be the film I would vote for to win the Oscar, but almost guaranteed to put a smile across your face. Bone Rating: Three and a Half Bones.

Le Maison en Petits Cubes - Directed by Kunio Kato - 12 minutes

Nearly as emotionally resonant as Manon on the Asphalt, Le Maison en Petits Cubes is a surprisingly effective silent film with a gorgeous physical rendering of the power of memory. An old man lives in a home where the water level is constantly rising. He has to build a new floor every few years as the water – a great symbol for age – continues to rise. With the addition of every floor, he creates a trap door to the one below. One day he drops his pipe into the water and puts on scuba gear to dive down and get it. He goes down floor-to-floor, room-to-room, remembering the moments of his life that happened in that space, most of them centering on family and love. With a gorgeous score and a pencil-drawn style, Le Maison is like a great piece of classical music - transporting and transcendent. If I had a vote, it would go to this one. Bone Rating: Four Bones.

This Way Up - Directed by Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith - 9 minutes

This Way Up would be a VERY close second to Le Maison if I had an Academy vote, but I won't be dissatisfied in the slightest if this great piece of morbid slapstick wins the grand prize. This Way Up is about a father and son undertaker trying to get a full coffin to its final resting place and facing ridiculous challenges along the way. Very creative, funny, unpredictable, and visually original, This Way Up is likely to be the most popular clip on iTunes, short or animated. Don't miss it. Bone Rating: Four Bones.

Presto - Directed by Doug Sweetland - 5 minutes

The only Oscar-nominated short that most of you have probably already seen is Pixar's Presto, the great piece that played before Wall-E in theaters. Presto is excellent and it is very likely to win the Oscar, but Pixar has enough awards and is likely to get another one or two without Presto. It almost seems unfair to allow Presto into the competition. It's kind of like bringing a gun to a knife fight. These categories should support the new, unheralded voices in live action and animation. I don't mean that to take away anything from the accomplishment of Presto. It's great, but let's spread the love around. Bone Rating: Three and a Half Bones.

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(The theatrical presentation of the animated shorts will include bonus films - Varmints, John and Karen, Gopher Broke, and Hot Dog - which were not available for review.)

Overall Rating: THREE AND A HALF BONES

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: February 6^th, 2009 / Rating: NR