Clerks director Kevin Smith has described Mandy as “masterful f - ing filmmaking,” while Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro tweeted: “Crazy.

With a ramshackle Nicolas Cage in the lead role of Red Miller, a logger whose life is turned upside down when he runs into both a sex-cult leader and a murderous gang of drug-addled bikers, the film has been garnering rave reviews, the majority of which praise Cosmatos’s directorial flair and innovative script.Īt the Cannes Film Festival in May, Mandy received a four-minute standing ovation. The film, which opens tonight at the Capitol 6, is a revenge flick gone amok, with some of the bloodiest scenes put to film this year. The isolated existence of his childhood is played out in technicolour splendour in his latest film, Mandy. This is the Victoria that 44-year-old writer-director Panos Cosmatos grew up in.

The majority of media that teens consumed came via Vancouver or Seattle radio stations, a few channels on TV and movies shown in a few local theatres. A-list concerts were few and far between, desirable albums at local record stores were expensive imports and video stores had so-so catalogues. In doing so, he gave the film a mobility and energy, but also the feel of a backstage pass we’re along for the ride of being a Beatle, invited to an exclusive party with four cheeky, charming rock stars.If you happened to be a teenager living in a relatively remote location - such as an island off the west coast of Canada - in the early 1980s, life had a very small frame of reference. And so they did, hiring quirky Richard Lester to direct and playwright Alun Owen to pen a script that wouldn’t ask the lads from Liverpool to do much in the way of acting they would play fictionalized versions of themselves, riffing on their existing personas, in a “day in the life of the Beatles” narrative that Lester shot in cinéma vérité style (black and white, handheld, the works). That combination of a need for speed and a shrugging, write-off attitude from the suits meant that, so long as they could do it quickly (cameras rolled less than four months before the film hit British cinemas), they could make just about whatever movie they wanted. United Artists only financed the picture so that they could get their hands on the certain-to-be-profitable soundtrack album. The directive was for the Fab Four to knock out a jukebox musical, and to do it quickly enough that Beatlemania wouldn’t have ended by the time it galloped into theaters. The thing is, it wasn’t supposed to be great.

Rock opera movies