brilliant actors, brilliant editing

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Priorities sees a man and his dog crash land on an island in a storm and then try to work out a way to get off and back to safety. The story, as the title suggests, is less about that than it is about the relationship between the man and his dog as they try to survive together. It is told in a couple of stages in the short running time and we do get a sense of their relationship and what it means to the man, but to be honest it doesn't really do much more than what is narratively obvious in that regard. So in one scene we see a choice made, and this is really the crux of it in terms of the plotting. Dog owners may bring their own emotions to it to add more, but for what the plot is, it doesn't do as much as you would hope.The animation is a mixed bag too. On one hand it looks pretty good, with fluid movement and long flowing takes; however it looks too much like a video game for me to stop seeing it as such. The camera moves around the action and stays close to the main character in many ways, while the basic "look" of it also has an indie game feel. I did really care for this sense of constant movement, not just because of it feeling like a game (nothing wrong with that) but more that it limited the emotional impact of the content by not allowing the film to rest and feel.It does have a certain sweetness to it and dog lovers may get more of the feels than others by virtue of what they bring to it themselves, but for me it was a bit too emotionally simple and the style of animation didn't seem like a good choice in terms of fitting with what it was doing in the narrative.