Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated American Indie Films of 2018: #61. Bart Layton’s American Animals

Published on January 16, 2018

American Animals

Coming from a docu debut, in 2012, Bart Layton‘s The Imposter was selected for Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition and from there landed several nominations British Independent Film Awards and Cinema Eye Honors. He then workshopped his fiction debut American Animals at the Sundance Labs in 2015 (including a Sundance Institute and Skywalker Sound Music and Sound Design Labs this past summer) after completing a shoot in Charlotte this past February.

With Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd and Udo Kier, set in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004, Spencer and Warren dream of remarkable lives beyond their middle-class suburban existence. They head off to colleges in the same town, haunted by the fear they may never be special in any way. Spencer is given a tour of his school’s incredibly valuable rare book collection and describes it all to Warren. Suddenly, it hits them—they could pull off one of the most audacious art-thefts in recent history, from the university’s special collections library. If as alluring

Release Date/Prediction: This premieres at the Sundance Film Fest’s U.S. Dramatic Comp.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).