American Animal: Critic Reviews

MovieWeb: 0 reviews

65%

Rotten Tomatoes: 19 reviews

New York Times (Top Critic)

Full Review » 1 year ago
Andy Webster New York Times (Top Critic)

40

[An] hour and a half of pretentious mind games...
Full Review » 1 year ago
Michael Atkinson Village Voice (Top Critic)

Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect...
Full Review » 1 year ago
Steve Dollar Wall Street Journal (Top Critic)

Personal filmmaking with ambition to burn.
Full Review » 1 year ago
V.A. Musetto New York Post (Top Critic)

75

It is well-acted and features witty repartee. Look for more good things to come from this talent.
Full Review » 1 year ago
William Goss Film.com (Top Critic)

The film equivalent of being cornered at a house party by someone's coked-out friend of a friend until your ride home is ready to bounce.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Eric D. Snider Film.com (Top Critic)

75

It's basically The Matt D'Elia Show, a peculiar film that takes risks and generally succeeds.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Robert Abele Los Angeles Times (Top Critic)

40

"American Animal" becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution).
Full Review » 1 year ago
Frank Lovece Film Journal International

Self-indulgent indie about a trust-fund kid who thinks he's found the answer to the human experience. Whit Stillman it's not.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Gabe Toro The Playlist

Full Review » 1 year ago
Noel Murray AV Club

25

It's best to imagine this movie as a study of three good young actors trapped in an indie film project with a yammering weirdo.
Full Review » 1 year ago
David Fear Time Out New York

60

While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding...
Full Review » 1 year ago
Drew McWeeny HitFix

American Animal deserves to be seen, but more than that, it deserves to launch D'Elia as a filmmaker of note, and I'm curious to see where he goes from here.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Jessica Baxter Film Threat

80

The eloquent, thought-provoking dialog flows at a theatrical pace, but it doesn't feel unnatural.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Charles Ealy Austin American-Statesman

It's bizarre in countless ways. It's risk-taking. It's brave. It's the work of a young filmmaker who dares to be different. It'll be interesting to see what he does next.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Kalvin Henely Slant Magazine

75

It may be baked with the same ingredients that come in your standard mumblecore starter kit, but because of Matt D'Elia's indebtedness to other movies, the film follows a different recipe altogether.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Kenji Fujishima Slant Magazine

D'Elia's debut feature is, I think, a challenge worth taking. Here, it appears, is a real emerging vision, original, gutsy, and uncompromising.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Emily Kirkpatrick Paste Magazine

51

This ending helps make American Animal a thought-provoking debut film that, though in need of further development and refinement, shows a lot of promise.
Full Review » 1 year ago
Fred Topel Screen Junkies

I think American Animal is an exercise in pure creativity, as in creativity in a vacuum with no consequence of narrative.
Full Review » 1 year ago