Stars: Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Barry Keoghan, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk, Chas Allen, Betty Jean Gooch | Written and Directed by Bart Layton
A few months ago in the midst of the turmoil that is Film Twitter, a question was asked: “What is the quintessential American film?” Inevitably the onslaught of answers served to be intriguing, after much thought iIbelieve in 2018 alone we have had two. The first being Scott Cooper’s devastatingly captivating and stoic western Hostiles. The second is Bart Layton’s devastating, traumatic dramatic/documentarian feature American Animals. The latter is a chaotic onslaught of horrifying consequence with the prompting of such a crime a varied and interesting delve into the white privileged psyche.
Layton utilises both a dramatic feature narrative threaded with a series of documentarian interviews with the real culprits of the crime. In doing so all rules and restrictions...
A few months ago in the midst of the turmoil that is Film Twitter, a question was asked: “What is the quintessential American film?” Inevitably the onslaught of answers served to be intriguing, after much thought iIbelieve in 2018 alone we have had two. The first being Scott Cooper’s devastatingly captivating and stoic western Hostiles. The second is Bart Layton’s devastating, traumatic dramatic/documentarian feature American Animals. The latter is a chaotic onslaught of horrifying consequence with the prompting of such a crime a varied and interesting delve into the white privileged psyche.
Layton utilises both a dramatic feature narrative threaded with a series of documentarian interviews with the real culprits of the crime. In doing so all rules and restrictions...
- 9/12/2018
- by Jak-Luke Sharp
- Nerdly
Surely the 21st century equivalent to the old Hollywood trope “Let’s put on a show!” is, judging by the movies that get made, “Let’s pull off a heist!” What that says about the evolution of our wish-fulfillment fantasies is a tad worrisome, so it’s refreshing that “American Animals,” which recreates and dissects a real 2004 robbery committed by a quartet of thrill-seeking college kids, grasps that there’s something singularly regrettable in how our popular art glorifies criminality.
And yet, for a good deal of its running time, writer-director Bart Layton’s slick, music-fueled assemblage of recreated narrative and documentary manages to be as deftly comic and suspenseful as the bank job movies from which Layton, and the incident’s perpetrators, took inspiration. Until, that is, the reality of bad decisions and corrosive entitlement act as an all-too-necessary dampener.
The crime was known as the “Transy Book Heist.
And yet, for a good deal of its running time, writer-director Bart Layton’s slick, music-fueled assemblage of recreated narrative and documentary manages to be as deftly comic and suspenseful as the bank job movies from which Layton, and the incident’s perpetrators, took inspiration. Until, that is, the reality of bad decisions and corrosive entitlement act as an all-too-necessary dampener.
The crime was known as the “Transy Book Heist.
- 5/31/2018
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
You'd call this heist film un-fucking-believable, except that American Animals really is rooted in fact – that is, whenever the British documentarian Bart Layton, in a mightily impressive narrative feature debut, doesn't mess around too much. "This is not based on a true story," reads a title card at the start ... before the words "not based on" slowly vanish from the screen.
It's 2004 in Lexington, Kentucky, when homeboys Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), students at local Transylvania University, decide to pull off a robbery. They don't need the money,...
It's 2004 in Lexington, Kentucky, when homeboys Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), students at local Transylvania University, decide to pull off a robbery. They don't need the money,...
- 5/31/2018
- Rollingstone.com
13 years ago, four privileged teenagers with bright futures and everything to lose went through with a half-baked scheme to steal millions of dollars worth of rare books from a local college. The story behind the brazen and bizarre heist, which has gone down as one of the most famous in history, is now coming to theaters in American Animals, out Friday.
“Lots of people make bad decisions when they’re young and nothing comes of those mistakes,” Spencer Reinhard, one of the group’s two original organizers, tells People. “In our instance, we picked something a little more extreme and...
“Lots of people make bad decisions when they’re young and nothing comes of those mistakes,” Spencer Reinhard, one of the group’s two original organizers, tells People. “In our instance, we picked something a little more extreme and...
- 5/29/2018
- by Mike Miller
- PEOPLE.com
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