If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
King of Thieves first published by RealCrime Magazine You probably know the score. After all, the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary took place not so very long ago, over the Easter Bank Holiday of 2015, and was said to be “the largest burglary in English legal history”, with around 200 million pounds’ worth of cash and jewellery…
The Night Eats The World first published by SciFiNow Everything you need to know about Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) is carefully laid out in the prologue to The Night Eats The World (La nuit a dévoré le monde) – the feature debut of director Dominique Rocher which he co-wrote with Jérémie Guez, and Guilaume Lemans. Returning…
Chimera first published by SciFiNow “I’m running out of time. I need to freeze time.” So says scientist Quint (Henry Ian Cusick) in writer/director/producer Maurice Haeems’ feature debut Chimera, as he races against fate to save his young children from the same hereditary disease that took his wife Jessie (Karishma Ahluwalia). Given Quint’s pioneering work…
Accepting the other: Xavier Gens on his latest genre film, Cold Skin – first published by SciFiNow With the borderland butchery (and cutting-edge politics) of his feature debut Frontier(s) (2007), Xavier Gens was on the very crest of the ‘French Extreme’ New Wave. While he was a journeyman director on the studio VG adaptation Hitman (2007),…
Who’s Watching Oliver first published by SciFiNow The first thing we hear in Who’s Watching Oliver is ticking, and the first thing we see is an alarm clock. Sure enough, Oliver (co-writer Russell Geoffrey Banks) calibrates life to a clockwork schedule: up at 10am, he spends his day sitting in Bangkok’s Dream World like a child – and…
Alice in the Underworld: The Dark Märchen Show!! first published by Senses of Cinema In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) – children’s novels written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll – young Alice goes on a wide-eyed odyssey through the psychic flotsam and jetsam of nineteenth-century…
New Year’s Eve is the time to redress past regrets and to make future resolutions; the time when traditions are preserved, even as change is embraced; the time when, Janus-like, we look backwards and forwards simultaneously; the time when it’s out with the old and in with the new. It is also when the events…
Bad Samaritan first published by RealCrime Magazine Bad Samaritan opens with a flashback: a young boy whips a horse as an unseen woman pleads with him to stop, and then he raises a pistol and shoots. This is a primal scene – a significant event from that past that represents the moment where a person’s formative pathology takes root. Cut to…
Bad Times At The El Royale first published by Sight & Sound, December 2018 Review: Like his directorial debut Cabin in The Woods (2012), Drew Goddard’s second feature as writer/director, Bad Times at the El Royale, also concerns a structure with hidden rooms, secret surveillance and the heady clash of stories/storeys – but its chief…
Assassination Nation first published by Sight & Sound, December 2018 Review: “This is 100% a true story,” says 18-year-old Lily Colson (Odessa Young) in her opening voiceover, promising a tale of a town losing its mind and wanting to kill four teenaged girls. “It gets pretty graphic,” she adds. Indeed, while many films begin with…
Sicilian Ghost Story first published by RealCrime Magazine 12-year-old Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) follows Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez) into the woods after school. Here, as a butterfly rests on Giuseppe’s hand and a weasel brushes past Luna’s foot, the children are close to nature in their Eden of innocence – even as a POV shot suggests a…