Release date: June 1, 2018
Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 85%
"American Animals" is the MoviePass-funded film that is actually good ("Gotti," not so much). Featuring a great young cast that includes "American Horror Story's" Evan Peters and "Dunkirk's" Barry Keoghan, "American Animals" is a heist movie based on a true story. Barry Layton's experience with documentary filmmaking shines through the narrative in a very literal way.
Description: "American Animals is the unbelievable but entirely true story of four young men who attempt to execute one of the most audacious art heists in U.S. history. The film centers around two friends from the middle-class suburbs of Lexington, Kentucky. Spencer (Barry Keoghan), is determined to become an artist but feels he lacks the essential ingredient that unites all great artists – suffering. His closest friend, Warren (Evan Peters), has also been raised to believe that his life will be special, and that he will be unique in some way. But as they leave the suburbs for universities in the same town, the realities of adult life begin to dawn on them and with that, the realization that their lives may in fact never be important or special in any way. Determined to live lives that are out of the ordinary, they plan the brazen theft of some of the world’s most valuable books from the special collections room of Spencer's college Library. "