Beasts of the Southern Wild

Directed by Benh Zeitlin

(PG-13)

“Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. This is such a movie and “one of the year’s best.” Benh Zeitlin, directing his first feature, sets his story about a young girl and her alcoholic father in a poor bayou community where locals fear an oncoming storm and trade tales of prehistoric creatures unleashed by melting ice caps. Given such themes, what’s surprising is how happy and “inspired by poetry” the picture is, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Schoolgirl Quvenzhané Wallis, an untrained child actor, displays palpable amusement in backwoods life, while Dwight Henry as her father (a baker in real life) “gives a performance of convulsive power.” The film could be thought of as “outsider art: patched together with found materials” and “evocative of a truly American attitude of eccentricity, boldness, transcendence,” said Steven Rea in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It transports us to a peculiar, magical place that somehow makes us feel “weirdly at home.”

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