It seemed to us, going into 2016, that one of the surefire cinematic highlights of the year would be the return of Andrea Arnold. Her first film “Red Road” was one of the most striking directorial debuts of the century so far, and follow-up “Fish Tank” was even better. Not everyone loved follow-up “Wuthering Heights,” but we fell hard for it, and between the three, she’d marked out space for herself as one of the most distinctive and assured new European directors.
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It’s been five years since she made a film, but she returned last month at Cannes with “American Honey,” a sun-kissed coming-of-age tale that, as the title suggests, marks her first time at making a film in the U.S, with the film following a group of teens (and principally Star, played by extraordinary breakout Sasha Lane) who work selling magazines on the road for the shifty Jake (Shia LaBeouf in something of a comeback role). And as you can see from the trailer that A24 dropped today, she doesn’t seem to have skipped a beat.
Also starring Riley Keough, Arielle Holmes and Will Patton, the film’s something of an epic at two and a half hours, but per Jess’s review from Cannes “distills the very essence of youth [and] serves up golden image after golden image as though dispensing amber shots of hard liquor.” The film won some fantastic reviews and the Jury Prize (Arnold’s third) and looks very, very special from the glimpse you’ll find above.
A24 will release the film later in the fall, and if anyone can connect a film like this with a young audience, “Spring Breakers” style, it’ll be them.