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

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.