American Animals

American Animals (2018) is a crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Bart Layton braids scripted scenes together with documentary footage, so the actual men who lived this story show up on screen alongside the actors playing them.

Lexington, Kentucky, in the mid-2000s. Four college students, sick to death of how ordinary their futures look, hatch a plan to steal rare books from their university library, including a fortune's worth of Audubon prints. Spencer (Barry Keoghan) and Warren (Evan Peters) get pulled deep into the fantasy of a slick, movie-style heist. The closer the scheme gets to real life, the clearer it becomes that life doesn't cut together as cleanly as film, and the fallout won't be cinematic at all.

Layton keeps letting the real participants contradict one another about what actually happened, and that disagreement pulls the floor out from under you. The result is a rare heist picture that cares less about the loot than about why four comfortable kids would torch their own lives for it. Stream American Animals (2018) online on iFILM.