American Honey · reception & legacy
2016 · Andrea Arnold
How American Honey has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It won Arnold her third Cannes Jury Prize in 2016 to strong reviews but plenty of 'nearly three hours of nothing' pushback; since then it's been fully embraced by the Letterboxd generation as one of the decade's defining road movies — though it's also now inseparable from being the set where Shia LaBeouf and FKA twigs met.
What's debated
The eternal fight: is the 163-minute runtime a hypnotic, earned immersion or self-indulgent sprawl — and can you still watch LaBeouf's (genuinely great) performance the same way?
Its footprint
The Kmart dance to Rihanna's 'We Found Love' is one of the most beloved needle-drops of the 2010s, endlessly clipped and referenced, and the film basically wrote the playbook for the 'golden-hour, 4:3, non-actors' aesthetic that flooded indie cinema after it.
Where it stands
A certified Letterboxd darling and A24-era touchstone — the kind of film whose four-star reviews are just song lyrics and a heart emoji.