American Animal

It's showtime!" says Jimmy, the one-man band of American Animal. And for Matt D'Elia, who plays him in this hour and a half of pretentious mind games, it certainly is. There are other players, but it's all about Jimmy, portrayed with a free-associative, Jim Carrey-like mania. Full Review

While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins. Full Review

Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia). Full Review

Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy. Full Review

At first American Animal has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure's emptiness. But when James admits he's taken a job - upending the roomies' slacker utopia - American Animal becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution). Full Review