86% Beasts of the Southern Wild

All Critics (113) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (97) | Rotten (16)

The atmosphere Zeitlin develops here is moist with promise and danger, and he moves back and forth between outright fable and pungent reality with an astounding sureness of vision for a first-time director.

Beasts is film as natural mystery museum.

Beasts of the Southern Wild marks one of the most auspicious American directorial debuts in years.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is like outsider art: patched together with found materials, conjured up by untrained artists (the actors), and evocative of a truly American attitude of eccentricity, boldness, transcendence.

It hews to no aesthetic or political party line. It is simply life, seen through the kaleidoscope eyes of a brave, imaginative child.

It's unlike any film you've seen.

Director Behn Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar crafted a small miracle here, a delicate mix of hardscrabble fact and childish fantasy, tapping the poetry of ignorance from the perspective of a child.

This kind of [shaky] camerawork smacks of outright laziness, and there isn't a single scene where it doesn't distract from the many lovely things the film gets right.

The film might be a bit too harsh for small children. That's a shame, since, like Whale Rider, it offers some valuable life lessons for kids, ones far more heady than the usual "Be yourself" mantra repeated ad nauseam in countless animated features.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" develops characters the likes of which film rarely sees, features strong performances, has an impressive score, and a pretty powerful message. Unfortunately it comes off a little too artistic for it's own good.

A beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence.

Magic and realism meet in this transporting, immersive tale set in the wilds of south Louisiana.

When Zeitlin zeroes in on the father and daughter, Beasts of the Southern Wild sucks us in and makes us care.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" is a film to get lost in.

A daring, lyrical and challenging piece of folk art that defies easy explanation.

As neo-realism dissolves into magic, "Beasts" becomes a work very much of our time, a cry for the handmade in our chilly digital era.

All of the unique elements here never add up to a cohesive or satisfying whole.

[Quvenzhan? Wallis] gives a terrific performance. She's not merely natural, like many good child actors; she inhabits this indomitable girl, who's innocent and philosophic and primal by turns.

Trying to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild seems fruitless, like trying to describe the quality of moonlight -- suffice it to say that it's lovely to behold and somehow magical.

Where so many emerged feeling a kind of euphoria, I left discouraged. The music that those closing moments demand [should be] troubling and tragic, not a triumphant anthem.

Thrilling and transfixing, it's an evocative, contemporary allegory.

One of the best performances by a child actor, in a movie that feels wonderfully created by that child.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" is as unique as it is uneven, as unforgettable as it is uncomfortable, and it trembles with the energy, bravura and passion of director Zeitlin, his cast and his crew like some rough animal.

Hushpuppy exists fully in whatever moment she happens to find herself in. It's a jaw-droppingly good performance from this pint-sized, first-time actor.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/

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