Sightlines · reception
How American Honey was received
2016 · Andrea Arnold · American Honey on Sightlines
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.
Did you know? Andrea Arnold discovered lead Sasha Lane, then a college student with no acting experience, while she was sunbathing on the beach during spring break in Panama City, Florida — and street-cast most of the mag crew the same way, shooting the film on a real cross-country road trip.