75
For all its mode-bending gamesmanship, American Animals is ultimately a fairly straightforward heist movie, albeit a stylish and engaging one.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
The Film Stage by Daniel Schindel
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.
58
American Animals is fiercely entertaining from start to finish, even when its characters are acting so dumb that you start to suspect they still have some more evolving to do.
90
Screen International by Fionnuala Halligan
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.
100
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.
50
All four actors are perfectly fine here, but the set-up is predictably conventional.
63
Slant Magazine by Keith Watson
As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.
83
Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt
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.
88
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.
90
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
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.