On this week’s episode of The Cinephiles, your hosts Lauren and Collin turn their lens to Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a sprawling, nearly three-hour road trip through the forgotten corners of the American heartland. The film follows Star, a young woman fleeing a life of poverty and abuse in rural Oklahoma, who joins a traveling magazine sales crew led by the magnetic and volatile Jake. What begins as a promise of freedom quickly reveals itself to be something far more complex: a system of exploitation dressed in the language of opportunity, where charm, labor, and even bodies become commodities.
In the episode, Lauren and Collin unpack the cinematic choices that make Arnold’s vision so arresting, from her use of the intimate 4:3 aspect ratio to a soundtrack that pulses with trap, hip-hop, and country. The hosts then dig into the film’s central tension: the staggering distance between the mythology of the American Dream and the reality waiting on the other side of every motel door and strip mall parking lot. From there, the conversation turns to Arnold herself, a British director stepping onto American soil for the first time, and whether her outsider perspective sharpens or complicates the story she tells.
If you’re drawn to films that refuse easy answers, that sit with discomfort instead of resolving it, this episode is for you. Lauren and Collin don’t just walk through the plot. They wrestle with what it means to believe in a dream that was never built to include you.
