Any time a plane even half-full of Argentines touches down on the runway at Ezeiza International Airport in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, applause and hollering and general uproar sweeps through the cabin. When my brother and I went to watch American Honey one evanescent night of winter a few years back, as the credits rolled two hours forty three minutes into the film we channeled the latin in us and hollered and applauded and brrrap’d from the far right of row G, causing the rest of Screen 3 to fumble about in the darkness for their coats and scarves with extra-specially furrowed brows. I think one person joined in. With good reason.

The film is unbelievably good.



I watched it again last week.

I can’t remember being made this happy by a film since Pride Rock went apeshit at the end of the Lion King.

One reviewer called the film a Youthquake.

Sasha Lane who plays the main character Star had no previous acting experience. The director Andrea Arnold who did Red Road and Fish Tank found her on a beach somewhere and convinced her to come for a casting.

The sex scenes make Normal People look like SpongeBob SquarePants.

There’s a shot near the end in a van where QT this girl turns around and an extended smile breaks across her face, that captures the whole thing in the shell of a nut.

I spoke to someone the other day who said it was too long and rambled on and nothing happened. Two sets of people walked out of the cinema half way through. My bro and I spent almost three hours with mouths wide open forcing our bladders to seven times their natural size because we didn’t want to miss any part of it. The silences, the close-ups of faces, the spaces in between. The music. Everything.