Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated American Indie Films of 2018: #81. Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy

Published on January 15, 2018

Mandy

Canadian helmer Panos Cosmatos found a lot of fanfare stateside for his debut film in 2010’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, so naturally the XYZ Films and Spectre Vision folks saw a bankable filmmaker might be trending for whatever he conjured up for his sophomore project. Enter Mandy, the Sundance selected, blood-soaked action-thriller that shot this past summer in Belgium. We called his debut film “a nightmarish world that’s aggravating, hypnotic, and original”. It bodes will for the project co-written alongside Aaron Stewart-Ahn.

Starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke, Richard Brake, Ned Dennehy, Olwen Fouere, and Hayley Saywell, this is set Pacific Northwest. Red Miller (Cage) and Mandy Bloom (Riseborough) lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire. Johann Johannsson (Sicario, Lovesong) wrote the score.

Release Date/Prediction: Mandy landed a spot in the Midnight section at the Sundance Film Festival.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).