American Honey

Star, who has been getting food out of bins, joins a travelling crew of young people selling magazine subscriptions door to door and starts living in a van across the middle of America. Andrea Arnold found Sasha Lane on a beach in Panama City during spring break with her friends, and Lane decided to audition after that encounter. Shooting ran 56 days from May to July 2015 and was done chronologically, with the crew genuinely travelling through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa. Shia LaBeouf was briefly hospitalised in North Dakota during filming and continued. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2016, Arnold's third after Red Road in 2006 and Fish Tank in 2009, and also took Best British Independent Film. Against a 3.5 million dollar budget it grossed only 2.8 million domestically. Who it is for: viewers who like road films, performances that feel improvised, and music doing the narrative work. Who it is not for: anyone sensitive to length. It runs 163 minutes and offers experience rather than plot, which loses some people halfway.