Beasts of the Southern Wild

Director Benh Zeitlin’s festival-storming debut feature is the indie version of Dark Knight: hyped, reflexively praised, plumbed for lessons. Most of that is deserved. Wild’s superhero is Hushpuppy, the fearless 6-year-old given haunting embodiment by the now 8-year-old first-timer Quvenzhané Wallis. If the screenplay — by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar, based on a one-act play by Alibar — sometimes tilts toward the precious (as Hushpuppy, in voice-over, works out chaos theory), Ben Richardson’s visceral photography and the movie’s salty, sinewy examination of food chains — metaphorical and market-real — more than compensate.