Beasts of the Southern Wild

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.

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.

A dreamy but strikingly immediate and frayed-at-the-edges, child's-eye view of life on the margins of America.

A beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence.

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

It's an amazing vision. A work of art.

Hushpuppy, a six-year-old with no superpowers, no great destiny, not even much by way of contact with the outside world, is a more active female protagonist than 99% of [Hollywood heroines].

In a time when the cynicism of the real world often mandates the tone of our films, here is one that acknowledges it all with unwavering joy.

It plays like Days of Heaven by way of The Road Warrior.

As Wink, Hushpuppy's father, Dwight Henry is one of the greatest finds in Hollywood in years. Henry shows a depth and range that made actors like Denzel Washington so great.

A cute, but meandering story of growing up alone and having to fend for oneself even when there's help to be received.