A review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Director – Matt Piedmont; writer – Andrew Steele; director of photography – Ramsey Nickell; editor – David Trachtenberg; music – Andrew Feltenstein and John Nau; production design – Kevin Kavanaugh; costumes – Trayce Gigi Field and Marylou Lim; producers – Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Emilio Diez Barroso, Darlene Caamaño Loquet and Andrew Steele. Starring – Will Ferrell (Armando Alvarez), Gael García Bernal (La Onza), Diego Luna (Raul), Genesis Rodriguez (Sonia), Pedro Armendáriz Jr. (Miguel Ernesto), Nick Offerman (Agent Parker), Efren Ramirez (Esteban) and Adrian Martinez (Manuel). NALA and Pantelion Films. In Spanish, with English subtitles. 1 hour 24 minutes.

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Sketch comedy artists like Will Ferrell face a challenge when they make the leap to the big screen. Can they come up with an idea that is substantial enough to last the length of a feature film? If they do, can they succeed again?

Steve Martin may have set the bar for this with a string of durable, multifaceted comedies like The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Roxanne, and L.A. Story… until the 90s, when he started taking roles that demanded little or nothing from him creatively. Chevy Chase delivered an inspired Fletch and the Vacation movies made good use of dopey charisma. But then it was just more of the same, again and again, with diminishing returns. Bill Murray’s movies were hit-and-miss, until his untapped potential as a character actor and a dramatic actor gave him an exciting new career beyond what anybody had anticipated.

Will Ferrell has Bill Murray potential. From Elf to Step Brothers, he’s headlined an impressive list of comedies that have been worth at least a matinee. And in Stranger Than Fiction and Everything Must Go, he’s shown surprising range, developing fuller characters that required much more of him than mere absurdity.

But his crowning achievement remains Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which has become a sort of cult classic of comedy, and rightly so. It was bound to happen. Will Ferrell’s work on Saturday Night Live created some of the most inspired and hilarious man-child characters in the show’s history. Burgundy brought out his best.

Anchorman also worked because its subject – TV news and the ’70s – was rich with comic potential. It also worked because he had a supporting cast with as talented, if not more talented, than him, and they brought out the best in each other. While much of it appeared to be the fruit of inspired improvisation, that improvisation produced heights of absurdity unlike anything we’d seen since the peak of the Zucker Brothers and Monty Python.

Alas, none of that is the case with Casa de Mi Padre. This movie, directed by newcomer Matt Piedmont, would have made an amusing skit, and perhaps a recurring character on SNL could have found ways to tease good laughs out of it. (After all, there is something absurdly funny about the way Ferrell speaks Spanish with the conviction of a beginner who thinks he sounds convincing.) But even though Ferrell commits as completely to this absurd character as anybody he’s ever played, this 86-minute film feels like two hours. The filmmakers fumble again and again in their uninspired attempts at hilarity. It’s not just boring… it’s frustrating, because we now how much better Ferrell can be when he’s given creative material. Case de Mi Padre had the potential to explore a wild territory of comic absurdity. But it runs out of good ideas fast.

Ferrell plays an idiot named Armando, the son of a rancher who has always felt insecure next to his successful older brother Raul (Diego Luna). When Raul brings a fiancée home, this beauty (Genesis Rodriguez) quickly sympathizes with poor Armando. And as he begins to discover that Raul is involved in the work of the drug lord Onzo (Gael Garcia Bernal), he must decide who to trust, and how to escape the inevitable violence that crooks like Onza bring with them.

Is it supposed to be a spoof of Mexican soap operas? Then what’s with the excess of slow-motion shootings and the fountains of blood? Is it supposed to make fun of a certain period of low-budget Mexican cinema, or cheap Westerns? If so, I’m clearly not part of the target audience.

One of the details that inspired me to take time for this film was the inclusion of Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) and Luna (The Terminal), who starred together in the celebrated road movie Y Tu Mama Tambien. And they certainly seem game to overplay their stock characters (a drug lord and a dealer). But the film doesn’t only finds a couple of scenes that give them anything interesting to play. Pretty soon, I started projecting my own boredom on to them.

Oh, there are laughs, especially in the first 20 minutes. Most of the film’s best moments involve Armando and his two ranching buddies just passing time, laughing at their own bland chitchat, singing a song at a campfire in a desert populated by the work of taxidermists. I won’t elaborate, in case you do end up seeing this film; you’re going to want to enjoy the laughs when they come. But for the most part, the comedy consists of things we’ve seen before.

Wacky naked love scenes? Top Secret! and The Tall Guy are standard-setting sex-scene spoofs. If you still think the sight of Ferrell’s bare ass is funny, this one may spark a few chuckles, but then it just keeps going and going.

Spoofs of shootouts? You’d do better to revisit Top Secret! again, or Hot Fuzz.

Absurd, hallucinatory dream sequences in which Ferrell dresses up in wild costumes? This movie makes me think that the director said “Let’s come up with some really weird stuff, like you did in Zoolander.”

Making things even more unstable is the film’s preoccupation with bodies being blown to bits by bullets. The running gag of the film’s cheapness, its fake backdrops and stuffed animals, make the carnage seem strangely incongruous. It’s not funny. It’s kind of disturbing.

Okay, I know that what’s funny to some people isn’t funny to others. But certainly we can talk about whether a comedy is creative. This one has a few good ideas, which I happen to think are poorly executed, and it then returns to them again and again. The film’s reliance on stuffed animals for the desert wildlife is funny the first couple of times, but the filmmakers seem to love the idea so much that they spend more and more time on it.

Is Ferrell getting lazy? Is he losing his touch? I’m not sure. Maybe he had a good idea, and it ended up in the hands of the wrong screenwriters and the wrong director. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it’s worth speculating about. Whatever happened, I hope Ferrell sits down and watches this sometime, and I hope he senses how quickly it runs out of fuel as soon as it’s out on the road. I’m sure he has plenty of experience watching SNL skits that never really lived up to their potential. Those are easy to forgive. But this 86-minute sketch is costing moviegoers around $12 bucks a ticket. They deserve something memorable for that kind of money.

A review by Jeffrey Overstreet.

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Director – Andrew Stanton; writers – Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon; based on “The Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs; director of photography - Dan Mindel; editor - Eric Zumbrunnen; production design - Nathan Crowley; costumes - Mayes C. Rubeo; music - Michael Giacchino; special effects supervisor - Chris Corbould; producers - Jim Morris, Colin Wilson and Lindsey Collins. Starring – Taylor Kitsch (John Carter), Lynn Collins (Dejah Thoris), Samantha Morton (Sola), Willem Dafoe (Tars Tarkas), Dominic West (Sab Than), Mark Strong (Matai Shang), Thomas Haden Church (Tal Hajus), Ciaran Hinds (Tardos Mors), James Purefoy (Kantos Kahn), Daryl Sabara (Edgar Rice Burroughs), Polly Walker (Sarkoja) and Bryan Cranston (Powell). Walt Disney Pictures. 2 hours 17 minutes.

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“Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.”

That’s how C.S. Lewis famously stated the question each man and woman must answer about the Messiah, the savior from heaven, whose initials are J.C. Others have since paraphrased him: “Liar, lunatic… or lord?”

In the new space fantasy adventure by Pixar filmmaker Andrew Stanton, that question comes up again. This time, the people of Mars must decide what to make of their own J.C. … their own savior who claims to have come from the heavens (or more specifically, from Earth).

But in the end, the question is for us to answer. Is John Carter — the movie — a letdown, looney toons, or a landmark?

There are critics who will line up behind each of those answers.

What’s this moviegoer’s answer? All of the above.

When the credits rolled at the end of John Carter, I was relieved… relieved that it’s wasn’t the $230 million dollar disaster that I’ve been hearing about. And yet, the more I think about the film, yeah… I am disappointed. I wanted to love it. Instead, I’m begrudgingly clicking on “Like.”

I’m very sorry to say this, as I have been (and will remain) a huge fan of Andrew Stanton. He made Finding Nemo which remains my favorite film in the Pixar canon. He made WALL-E, which I love deeply and watch frequently. But there are a few flagrant flaws in John Carter, such that I would never have associated the film with the Stanton name (or with the name of his co-writer, Michael Chabon).

It’s not entirely his fault. The material — from the early, pre-Tarzan work of Edgar Rice Burroughs — is wonderfully ludicrous to begin with. Burroughs concocted grandiose fantasies with little that can be taken very seriously by anyone over the age of fourteen. And the names he gave to places and characters sound like they were made up by a six-year-old. For some, that fact alone will be a deal-breaker — and sure enough, the movie’s inspiring the wrath of a thousand cynical critics.

Still, this is material that has captivated the imaginations of adolescents — especially boys — for generations. I’m still fond of stories like that, and so the names didn’t bother me. If Stanton and Chabon had tried to make John Carter hip, or if they’d sought to erase its epic silliness, it would be a betrayal of the material.

You can feel Stanton’s childlike enthusiasm for this stuff all the way through. While he toes the line of camp throughout, letting us know that he’s mature enough to see how silly it is, he never apologizes for the genre or its conventions. He never turns it into a joke.

Because of that, I find the film endearing in spite of its flaws.

Alas, the biggest flaw of all is its title character.

John Carter — a gold-hunting Confederate soldier who accidentally uploads himself to Mars — is amusingly rough, rugged, and irascible in the opening scenes. I enjoyed those scenes because they felt like they sprang from the imagination that worked so much physical comedy into WALL-E‘s opening act. But once Carter gets to Mars, his charisma disappears as rapidly as his home-world clothing.

Actor Taylor Kitsch certainly looks convincing as an Edgar Rice Burroughs hero in a loincloth and leather, slinging weapons around against big tusk-thrusting alien beasts. But every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like he’s working really hard to sound sexy and determined. He sounds like a college freshman who thinks he’s Gladiator‘s Maximus. He’s works hard to muster some of the Han Solo/ Indiana Jones brand of wise-assery. But as he throws himself whole-heartedly into the action… there’s just not much heart there to throw. The character has no humanizing foibles or depth. This Carter’s a muscular action figure, nothing more. (Steven Greydanus, in his fair and balanced review, shares an excerpt from Burroughs’ book that tells us just how engaging Carter should have been.) This guy makes Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully from Avatar seem almost Shakespearean in complexity.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t just about him. Everybody else in the movie — even the goofy alien dog — is more interesting than him.

A few words about the setup: Mars, based on the vision of the red planet popular in Burroughs’ day, is called “Barsoom” by the natives. It looks like Star Wars’ Tatooine with its dusty dunes and big, clumsy alien steeds — actually, it looks more like the Tatooine of the prequels, which was a largely CGI environment that never looked quite as authentic as the Tunisian desert of the original. That’s an association that brings back bad memories. Doesn’t mean Stanton’s made a mistake; it’s just unfortunate. I don’t want to think about midi-chlorians while watching John Carter.

When Carter arrives on those hot sands, he seems to do just fine in all of that sunshine, and because of Mars’ weaker gravity, he can leap around like human-sized Yoda, or a flesh-toned Incredible Hulk. This is all goofy fun, but Kitsch doesn’t quite inhabit these illusory worlds as convincingly as Peter Jackson’s fellowship inhabited the animated environments of The Lord of the Rings. The whole thing feels more generated than actual, more artificial than organic, and more suited to comedy than drama.

There are three clashing cultures on Barsoom.

First and best, the Tharks. They’re nine-foot-tall, six-limbed mantis-like beings who enjoy Coliseum-style violence. There are four of them important to the plot — a conscientious, thoughtful leader (voiced by Willem Dafoe), a persecuted female (Samantha Morton), an imperious bitch (Polly Walker), and a carnage-loving brute (Thomas Haden Church). Impressively animated, these characters are just distinct enough in design to keep us from getting confused, and they actually did make me care about them. A little.

Then, there are the Zodangans. (See what I mean? The names!) The Zodangans are a violent military people with extravagant flying machines and one-note personalities. They’re led by Sab Than, who probably became a villain soon after his parents named him “Sab Than.” Sab (Dominic West, best known as Officer McNulty from The Wire) is brawny, obnoxious, and looks sharp in his wild costumes. But his role is basically to be the movie’s Prince Humperdink, armed with a magical hand cannon made out of a luminous, sugary blue web.

The weapon is a gift from another villain, a bland, shapeshifting, allegiance-free Satan whose powers are confoundingly inconsistent and undefined. Played by Mark Strong — please, somebody, forbid him from playing stock villains ever again — this devil isn’t just one note, he’s a broken piano key pounded over and over again.

And then there is the beautiful but persecuted city of Helium, full of… what? Heliumites? While I was hoping to find somebody there who spoke in a cartoonish, Chipmunk-y voice, instead I got the king of Helium, played by Ciarán Hinds. Hinds has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for playing emperor-like characters in pseudo-Roman gear. He has that haunted tyrant look — like his mind is playing an endless loop of his worst nightmares, or like he lives in a perpetual state of having just discovered that his favorite TV series has been canceled. But he’s a great actor, and he really sells it here.

The king of Helium has reason to look distressed. The only way he can save his city from the advancing Zodangans is to give up his daughter in marriage to the wicked Prince Humperdinck.

And now we come to the film’s one truly wondrous feature:

Ladies and gentlemen, the Princess of Mars! Oh, why didn’t they call the movie John Carter and the Princess of Mars? It would have been so much cooler and more accurate. The Princess of Mars owns this movie. Like Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri in Avatar, she’s ten times as charismatic and persuasive as her male counterpart.

Playing the princess, whose name is Dejah Thoris, Lynn Collins is a revelation. And I’m not just talking about those costumes (Dejah-view!) which she was clearly born to wear. As the nubile warrior princess. Collins seems so at ease, so persuasive in her speeches about her home city of Helium, so commanding in combat, that moviegoers are likely to lose track of the plot as they dream of seeing her star in Wonder Woman.

There’s just enough sexual tension between the princess and J.C., and just enough spirited action to keep things humming along. But the film’s strong points almost make it more frustrating, because you can see that a few more weeks on the screenplay might have turned this from an amusing time at the movies into a great adventure film.

So it’s aggravating. I just don’t care about Carter himself. And the CGI battle scenes are just a familiar kind of Attack of the Clones-inspired CGI chaos. I found my attention drifting whenever battles were unleashed. I wanted Stanton’s storytelling skills to carry me far away from any memories of The Phantom Menace. Instead, I felt somewhat detached, watching the film give frequent and enthusiastic high-fives to the many superior sci-fi and fantasy epics that were inspired by Burroughs’ fantasies. (In the opening act, there is an obvious homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark’s famous prologue. Later, Carter is seen bathed in blue blood, looking a little like a fellow from the planet Pandora.)

This sustained amusement was only disrupted by occasionally predictable plot twists. (One particularly convenient event near the end involves an entire culture changing its mind about something rather momentous, simply because it will enable “save the day” heroics.)

Overall, watching John Carter is like watching March Madness basketball only to see the highest-ranked team win a game by a couple of points after a disappointing performance.

I want to buy Andrew Stanton a drink, sit down, and hear him lament what must have been a hell of a project to manage. The cynical commentaries and “What went wrong?!” speculations are, for the most part, useless noise and arrogant presumption. Movies are complicated. Big-budget “tentpole” films are incredibly challenging. It’s a wonder any of them ever work. Considering the challenges, and that this was Stanton’s first live-action film, I’m sufficiently impressed. I found John Carter to be much more satisfying than most recent superhero movies, and ten times more fun than Cowboys and Aliens. I hope he gets overwhelmed by requests for a sequel. And if he gets the chance to make one, I hope he’ll assemble a team of his best storytelling collaborators with a particular focus on beefing up the character — not the muscles — of John Carter. Because I want a movie about Dejah Thoris,  the Princess of Mars, that deserves her.

One more thing:

There’s a moment when John Carter and the princess test each other’s trust. She admits that she’s not sure if he’s a liar, or mad, or just what he says he is. I laughed out loud, incredulous. And not just because it reminds me of “the Jesus question.”

I laughed because I think C.S. Lewis would have seen the irony. Lewis believed that mythology has always contained traces of the Gospel, because it comes from our built-in expectation of a savior. Ancient mythology expressed humanity’s expectation of the Messiah. Recent mythology points back to the moment when our hopes, expressed in storytelling, were fulfilled in history. Imagine how Lewis  would laugh to hear those questions — paraphrasing what he described as the fundamental question posed to Jesus — raised in reference to a mythological big-screen hero in 2012. I suspect that Andrew Stanton knew what he was doing there.

It’s a good scene, whatever its origins. And when the Princess of Mars pins Carter with her fierce gaze, you can tell that she really wants to believe in him.

I wish I could too.

At Seattle’s Harvard Exit theatre last March, I witnessed a rare and wonderful thing on the big screen—a thoughtful portrayal of devout Christians putting their faith into practice.

I was caught off guard. I’ve developed a serious allergy to “Christian movies.” They usually turn out to be big-screen sermons with very little storytelling imagination and hardly a trace of poetry or visual composition. Moreover, they’re often misguided fairy tales that imply a relationship with Jesus will lead to answered prayers, wishes fulfilled, and oodles of happiness. In my experience, the closer I draw to Christ, the more challenging and often painful life becomes.

But this particular movie wasn’t another church-funded production. To my knowledge, this film wasn’t even marketed to Christian audiences.

…  (more…)

A Looking Closer Film Forum is an evolving “conversation” among critics… a “round-table” review of perspectives from critics I regularly consult as I revise my list of viewing priorities. I haven’t seen the film yet, but these reviews have intrigued me.

Check back from time to time, as I may add more reviews to the list.

The Secret World of Arrietty (more…)

My review of Wim Wenders’ 3D tribute to Pina Bausch is published at Good Letters, the blog belonging to Image.

A Looking Closer Film Forum is an evolving “conversation” among critics… a “round-table” review of perspectives from critics I regularly consult as I revise my list of viewing priorities. I haven’t seen the film yet, but these reviews have intrigued me.

Check back from time to time, as I may add more reviews to the list.

The Grey

It looks like we have the makings of a debate between these first two reviewers. (more…)

[UPDATED.]

When I post Favorite Films lists, they are always works in progress.

Here is Part One of my two-part reflection on the films of 2011, posted at Good Letters, the blog at Image.

And here is Part Two: my ten favorite films of 2011 (so far).

(more…)

Lucky Life is now streaming at Hulu, and my review is up at Good Letters, the blog at ImageJournal.org.

Xavier Beauvois’s beautiful drama Of Gods and Men tells the true story of nine French Trappist monks at the Monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains who risked their lives to serve the locals during a 1996 insurgence of violent extremists during the Algerian Civil War.

The cast features Lambert Wilson of the Matrix series and Michael Lonsdale (one of the big-screen’s human treasures) in memorable roles. Beauvois’s attention to the faces of his actors, to the script’s weighty conversations, and to the even heavier silences, is commendable.

I agree with my colleagues Michael Leary (Filmwell.org) and Steven Greydanus (DecentFilms.com): The humble service of these men is as vivid a portrayal of Christian service as I’ve ever seen on the big screen.

Of Gods and Men shows Christians and Muslims interacting in peace, respect, and friendship. Instead of demonizing Muslims, these monks even read the Quran in order to better understand and love their neighbors.

I haven’t had the opportunity to write extensively about this film yet, but here are some excellent reviews that I recommend you consider:

Michael Sicisnki (The Academic Hack): “The brothers lived in harmony with their Muslim community; they provided free health care, sold honey at the local market and were often honored guests and family celebrations. Beauvois presents a picture of two faiths living side by side in total mutual respect. However, this isn’t a rosy, pie-in-the-sky ecumenical vision. What he demonstrates is that the community shares a mutual distrust of their government, the army, the Muslim extremists, and the French colonizers of the past. That is, their bond has been sealed not through ideology but through laboring side by side, as well as each group studying the tenets of the others’ faith. That is, Beauvois shows that true religious belief requires effort, not ignorant sloganeering. And so, when the Islamist fundamentalists finally arrive in the end, Of Gods and Men has already built a nearly airtight argument that, regardless of what these men with guns might believe, they do not represent Islam. They are not men of God. Particularly when writing for Cargo, I try not to be USA-centric, but it is difficult to watch a film like Beauvois’s and clear my mind of the fact that, back home, bigots are burning Korans in order to protest the construction of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, which right-wing extremists have dubbed ‘the ground zero mosque.’ I hope that everyone in the U.S. has the chance to see this film.”

Steven Greydanus, Decent Films: “Xavier Beauvois’ sublime Of Gods and Men is that almost unheard-of film that you do not judge — it judges you. To one degree or another it defies every attempt to put it in a box, to reduce its challenge to a political or pious ideological stance to be affirmed or critiqued. Whoever you are, whatever you bring to it, it will not tell you exactly what you want to hear, unless that is all you are willing or able to hear. Seldom have I read so many reviews justly genuflecting to a film amid such inability to explain why, or with such unconvincing rationalizations for critical discomfort. … Of Gods and Men is a remarkably uncompromising film: uncompromising in its depiction of the challenge of Christianity, of the sharp divisions within Islam between the peaceful villagers and the bloodthirsty insurgents. It is profoundly engaged in political realities, yet it transcends politics. It is thoughtful, yet many of its best scenes are dialogue-free, from the routines of manual labor to the luminous emotional climax.”

Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running: “When a monk invokes the metaphor of birds perched on a branch with respect to their situation, a woman of the village corrects that monks: You are not the birds on the branch, she says to him; you are the branch. The film is finally about how these men come to gradually accept that fact. There’s no road-to-Damascus blinding light moment to be had here. Instead, there is a gradual solidifying, a taking-root, accompanied by incidental pleasures, sorrows, and some rather typically French ironies, as when Lonsdale’s Luc recalls Pascal’s observation that evil is never more cheerfully accomplished as when it’s done in the name of religious conviction. The generosity with which Beauvois and his wonderful cast share the lives of these men with the viewer makes the losses that end the film that much harder to bear. Be prepared to be shaken.”

A Looking Closer Film Forum is an evolving “conversation” among critics… a “round-table” review of perspectives from critics I regularly consult as I revise my list of viewing priorities. I haven’t seen the film yet, but these reviews have intrigued me.

Check back from time to time, as I may add more reviews to the list.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

• Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood Elsewhere): “The passionately praised Beasts of the Southern Wild … is everything its admirers have said it is. It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers. It’s something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of. …
• Peter Sciretta reports a standing ovation at Sundance after posting his own awestruck reaction.
• James Rocchi tweets: “BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: Imagine TREE OF LIFE in a Godless (but not hopeless or loveless) world of mud and blood and fire and flood.”
• Noel Murray tweets: “BEASTS OF SOUTHERN WILD (A-) Picture a live-action Miyazaki, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in pre-apocalyptic Louisiana. There you go.”
• Eric Kohn (The Playlist): “Supremely ambitious and committed to profundity, Beasts sets the bar too high and suffers from a muddled assortment of expressionistic concepts, but it still manages to glide along its epic aspirations.”
• Karina Longworth (LA Weekly): “Where so many films here at Sundance posit life on Earth circa now as a battle to stave off decline, Beasts both embraces that battle, and infantilizes it. That’s not necessarily a pejorative — when Hushpuppy says something like,”The entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right, and if you can fix the broken piece, everything can go right back,” her childlike understanding of returning to an old normal could double for the allegedly adult worldviews of what seems like half the films here. The film is never less than a wonder to look at; it’s also rarely anything more.”
• Michael Nordine (Film Threat): “Beasts of the Southern Wild suggests Days of Heaven by way of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: a dizzying, often fantastical journey across the outer delta as seen through the eyes of a little girl. A latter-day mud doctor, Hushpuppy narrates her tale with equal parts pluck and lyricism…. The balance struck here speaks to one of the film’s primary through-lines: the internal-external harmony between all things living and dead, even and especially those that wouldn’t appear to fit together. To say that Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature … is more than the sum of his parts would be to erroneously imply that the many diverse facets are always uniquely identifiable as such; everything blends so seamlessly that the film’s very creation seems a marvel in and of itself.”
• Simon Abrams (House Next Door): “This is the film you might get if Terry Gilliam conflated David Gordon Green’s George Washington with Alice in Wonderland. … Beasts of the Southern Wild is … a beautiful fairy tale about survivor’s guilt that’s about as good as the festival hype would have you believe.”

Come back later. I may be posting more voices here.