Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough are hardly what you’d call natural screen bedfellows. She’s the rising star with a talent for ethereal nuance; he’s the rampant Yank with innumerable viral videos devoted to his outrageous acting style. Yet, in the sophomore feature of Italian-Canadian filmmaker Panos Cosmatos, they kind of click. Indeed, to dismiss Mandy as the latest Cage rampage feels a tad unfair, even if it does feature an instantly iconic, bathroom-based, mourning scene. To riff on Glenn Close in The Wife, this is much more – visually – interesting than that.
There are two types of tower block in the east end of London, architecturally symbolising a polarisation that Mark Gillis proves to be all too aware of in Sink, his feature debut. On one side of the Thames are those sleek, glass bastions of capitalism that make up Canary Wharf; on the other, the concrete block epitomes of sixties social welfare. Naturally – in the tradition of Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Ken Loach – the hero of this socially aware, albeit morally ambitious, feature belongs to the latter.
From the studio that brought you an endless stream of Lego movies comes another franchise in the making. If this unremarkable animation is little more than distraction cinema for tots, it should at least leave audiences with a pleasing desire to be that little bit more inquisitive.
The Film Blog 