7: Beasts of the Southern Wild
I’d be totally cool if every movie season featured a breakout piece of genre ethnography, one that also served as a coming out party for a majorly talented young actress. Winter’s Bone introduced Jennifer Lawrence as an unlikely gumshoe, probing the seedy side of an Ozarks community that’s somehow more depressing than the nuclear wasteland of The Hunger Games, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is its magical realist sister film… just one that’s a few states removed.
Six year-old Quvenzhané Wallis is astonishing as the linchpin to this apocalyptic bayou fairy tale, and without her, the whole thing would have gone pear-shaped. First-time director Behn Zeitland combines dreamy visuals and a fantastic score into one enchanting little package, even when his “mouth of babes” philosophizing grows dangerously close to heavy-handed.
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