Beasts of the Southern Wild 2012

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Beasts of the Southern Wild is sheer poetry on screen: an explosion of joy in the midst of startling squalor and one of the most visceral, original films to come along in a while. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: Treat yourself to the experience of this perfect storm of a film, and the tiny force of nature that is Quvenzhane Wallis. Read more

Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: Beasts is striking and affecting in all kinds of ways. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Don't miss this one. A brave and inspired antidote to time-wasting mainstream movies, it is unlike anything you've seen before or will likely ever see again. In short, it is unforgettable. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: There's no trace of calculation, only artistic ambitions and hopes that have come to fruition in the year's finest film thus far. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: "Beasts of the Southern Wild" stays with you long after you've watched it, like a vaguely troubling but beautiful dream. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: Beasts moves with a dreamlike pulse, and is never better than when it doesn't feel the need to move much at all. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: It's undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: It's unlike any film you've seen. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Here is why some of us love the movies: They let you see with brand new eyes. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: [An] extraordinary southern gothic. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: The filmmaker comes from a perspective of great empathy and considerable skill. But he's a pile driver as a dramatist. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Director Benh Zeitlin, working from a script by Lucy Alibar adapted from her stage play Juicy and Delicious, can't seem to get a visual rhythm going. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Beasts is film as natural mystery museum. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: 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. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: The movie is small, local, and idiosyncratic. Then again, it's also a thing of beauty and originality - and for that, sustained huzzahs are in order. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: An exceptional American independent feature that deserves the best efforts to tap audiences that would surely embrace it. Read more

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: An extraordinary new drama whose fierceness, like its 6-year-old heroine Hushpuppy, grabs on and won't let go. Read more

Charlie McCollum, San Jose Mercury News: In filmmaking, as in Hushpuppy's world, everything must fit together just right. And in "Beasts of the Southern Wild," everything does. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: A beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence. Read more

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: What is also extraordinary is that almost all the people we see are actors. So this is not a documentary but a moving enactment by people who are themselves moved. Read more

Richard Brody, New Yorker: [Zeitlin's] as enraptured by his own imagery as by the poetry of the settings but never finds a distinctive form for his ambitious vision. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The film doesn't self-righteously revile these characters, which is fine. But perhaps worse, it loftily treats them like something out of Rousseau... Read more

Ella Taylor, NPR: It is strikingly hardheaded in its perception that the picayune dilemmas hotly debated on the media-mommy blogs are completely beside the point for a whole underclass of kids who must be brought up tough and self-reliant in order to survive. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: The images recall Terrence Malick, but the film fills "atmosphere" into dry narrative holes where a story should reside. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Movies that mix magic and gritty realism almost never work , but Zeitlin, who is making an auspicious feature directing debut, pulls it off with awesome results. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: 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. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: The movie comes across as a collection of competing themes and ideas that collide more often than complement one another and never fully gel. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: This film is a remarkable creation, imagining a self-reliant community without the safety nets of the industrialized world. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Beasts of the Southern Wild is a game-changer that gets you excited about movies again. Star Quvenzhane Wallis is a flat-out amazement. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Spielberg will love this film, if he doesn't already. Zeitlin's ability to create a believable world out of seemingly impossible ingredients is just that good. Read more

Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle: Its fertility and its terror stem from the same truth: To the young mind, there is no sealed barrier cleaving reality from fantasy. Not yet. The wall hasn't been built. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: Zeitlin's adoring gaze on the Bathtubbers' chaotic-yet-joyous way of life smacks of anthropological voyeurism: Rousseau's "noble savage" nonsense all over again, but with crawdads and zydeco. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: It hews to no aesthetic or political party line. It is simply life, seen through the kaleidoscope eyes of a brave, imaginative child. Read more

Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is a film to get lost in. Read more

Robert Levin, The Atlantic: A love letter to the people of the Bayou State, who have persevered in the face of apocalyptic tragedy. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: Beasts of the Southern Wild marks one of the most auspicious American directorial debuts in years. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: A dreamy but strikingly immediate and frayed-at-the-edges, child's-eye view of life on the margins of America. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Their surroundings-decimated cars converted into boats, kindly neighbors, a complete lack of pop detritus (save a Bulls jersey)-shriek of Screenwriterly Poetic Conceit. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: It's as if you're looking out at new land you've never seen before, or an old one you haven't really paid attention to. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: It is a beautifully acted, gorgeously shot work of potent emotional resonance, with a superbly evocative musical score. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: A stunning debut that finds its dandelion-haired heroine fighting rising tides and fantastic creatures in a mythic battle against modernity. Read more

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice: In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: A film that plays less like a grounded, human-scaled story than a dilettantish piece of cultural tourism. Read more