Ella Taylor reviews Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film which “racked up a total of four major awards and a storm of press attention” at Sundance and Cannes. It focuses on “Hushpuppy, a motherless bayou waif living on the edge of multiple disasters” in ”the Bathtub, a fictional wasteland on the wrong side of the tracks and the levee.”

“Zeitlin, a transplanted New Yorker and the son of two folklorists, wants us to experience Beasts as a fairy tale in a tradition reaching back to Grimm by way of Maurice Sendak.