American Honey

American Honey is the only film Andrea Arnold has set and shot outside the United Kingdom. It grew from a New York Times investigation into the “mag crews” of young people who roam the United States selling magazine subscriptions, and Arnold researched it on a road trip from California to Miami; it was first announced, as Mag Crew, at Film4's Cannes party in 2013. A UK–US production, it returned to Cannes in competition in 2016 and won the Jury Prize: Arnold's third, after Red Road in 2006 and Fish Tank in 2009.

Sasha Lane, discovered by Arnold on a spring-break beach and cast without any previous screen experience, plays Star, an Oklahoma teenager who walks away from a miserable home to join a van of drifters. Shia LaBeouf is Jake, the crew's star salesman, and Riley Keough is Krystal, the boss who keeps the takings. The rest of the crew were street-cast. As on Fish Tank, Arnold mixed scripted scenes with improvisation, filming unscripted exchanges in the van over a 56-day shoot across several states, and Robbie Ryan's camera stays close to the faces. The soundtrack, trap, country and pop side by side, is something the crew sing along to rather than music laid over the top.

Even admirers allowed that not every narrative risk across its 163 minutes pays off, yet IndieWire called it the closest thing to a magnum opus in Arnold's career. It won Best British Independent Film, Best Director and Best Actress for Lane at the British Independent Film Awards, and was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. Robert Christgau later named its soundtrack album the third best of the decade.