Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated American Independent Films of 2019: #26. Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy

Published on February 8, 2019

Honey Boy

Not unlike Kitty Green, Alma Har’el moves from a pair of free flowing in form docu features in Bombay Beach and LoveTrue into a narrative third project that also blurs the fiction lines. A meta project fresh out of the oven project that creative collaborator Shia Labeouf brought to the filmmaker, filming took place in Los Angeles back in May of 2018 with Noah Jupe, Lucas Hedges and Labeouf exorcizing demons. We expect this to be tonally colorful and emotionally loaded text.

Gist: This is the story of a child star attempting to mend his relationship with his law-breaking, alcohol-abusing father over the course of a decade, it’s loosely based on LaBeouf’s life. “Honey Boy” was LaBeouf’s childhood nickname.

Release Date/Prediction: This was selected for the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. Look for this to hit the film festival circuit – possibly Cannes before a theatrical release.

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).