American Animals

    American Animals
    2018

    Synopsis

    Lexington, Kentucky, 2004. Four young men attempt to execute one of the most audacious art heists in the history of the United States.

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    Cast

    • Evan PetersWarren Lipka
    • Barry KeoghanSpencer Reinhard
    • Blake JennerChas Allen
    • Jared AbrahamsonEric Borsuk
    • Warren LipkaThe Real Warren Lipka
    • Spencer ReinhardThe Real Spencer Reinhard
    • Chas AllenThe Real Chas Allen
    • Eric BorsukThe Real Eric Borsuk
    • Ann DowdBetty Jean 'BJ' Gooch
    • Gary BasarabaWarren Lipka Senior

    Recommendations

    • 100

      Variety

      This is unabashedly virtuoso, show-off filmmaking, as cocky as the misguided young men at the film’s center, who, at least for a period, saw their lives as a Hollywood romp in itself.
    • 90

      The Hollywood Reporter

      Both as a writer and director, Layton delivers the dramatic goods here with the skill of a pro at the top of his game while adding the rueful perspective of time's reassessment of youthful indiscretions; this has to rate among the most accomplished and fully realized big-screen debuts of recent times.
    • 90

      Screen Daily

      American Animals requires many cuts and perspectives which are second-nature to an accomplished documentarian, yet the drama here also seems effortless and seamlessly integrated.
    • 88

      Movie Nation

      American Animals is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage.
    • 83

      Entertainment Weekly

      A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.
    • 75

      The A.V. Club

      For all its mode-bending gamesmanship, American Animals is ultimately a fairly straightforward heist movie, albeit a stylish and engaging one.
    • 75

      The Film Stage

      American Animals is a legitimately exciting, funny, suspenseful, and at one point deeply upsetting crime film, ably demonstrating a command of genre trappings in service of a narrative about people warped by those very clichés.
    • 63

      Slant Magazine

      As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.