Life Tries Clumsily To Imitate Art In 'American Animals'
A heist isn't as easy as the movies might lead you to believe. That's the lesson learned by four brats who try to steal expensive rare books in a fact-based story about being terrible at crime.
Stuffed with references to classic crime flicks, American Animals is British writer-director Bart Layton's clever and assured bid to rival Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino. The film is highly self-conscious, but no more so than its real-life antiheroes, a quartet of Kentucky college kids who study The Killing and to plan a heist that turns out to be poorly scripted.
