Beasts Of The Southern Wild

With a quickly approaching June 27 release, Beasts Of The Southern Wild seems poised to capitalize on its recent Sundance buzz before everyone forgets all the nice things they said about it (and just in case they did, this trailer puts a lot of them up front). Not that Beasts is at all forgettable: Not only did it take the Grand Jury Prize easily, audiences and critics were fairly bowled over by writer-director Benh Zeitlin's unusual blend of the fantastic and the all-too-commonplace in his tale of a young poverty-stricken girl living in a sunken Louisiana swampland and her fight to survive the ever-looming apocalypse. Our own Noel Murray called it "something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration," which, while probably too erudite for a pull-quote, is quite the ringing endorsement—and he didn't even mention the giant boar creatures. Anyway, as it was at Sundance, Beasts is likely to be one of the more unusual and talked-about movies you'll see this year, and here's your first taste. (Apple also has it in HD.)