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…
Funny Games (aka Funny Games US) first published by Film4 Summary: Michael Haneke rewinds and replays his games of cinematic violence in this doubly uncompromising English-language remake of his 1997 film. Review: When directors remake their own films for an English-speaking audience, there tends to be an element of cultural reduction, or ‘dumbing down’ – after all,…
V/H/S/2 first published by Grolsch FilmWorks “Most of his collection I would say was snuff and CP, but he had at least one that was the real thing. I don’t even think he knew what it was.” So says missing student Kyle (L.C. Holt) in a webcam recording that a pair of camera-toting private investigators…
The Black Cat first published by Little White Lies, as entry 125 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Central to Edgar G. Ulmer‘s The Black Cat is a house built over an ancient graveyard. It is a classic gothic set-up, yet the house, far from conforming to the usual stones, firebrands and cobwebs of Universal Pictures’…
Silent Action (La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 124 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “A press release and a handful of front pages. Then it’s gonna be the back pages tomorrow – and who cares when everything will be forgotten, right?” This is the complaint of…
Bright Future (Akarui mirai) first published by EyeforFilm Beautiful, fragile, free-floating and amorphous, jellyfish seem to exude a brilliant lustre all of their own, and are inscrutable to any but their own kind – try and get too close, however, and they are liable to deliver a killer sting. These creatures feature aplenty in Kiyoshi…
The Power first published by VODzilla.co The Power opens with a dream. Terrified little girl Val (Marley Chesham) is shut in a dark school closet, and a match is struck in front of her face revealing a grown-up man in there with her, lighting his cigarette – and then the adult Val (Rose Williams) is…
Tokyo Sonata first published by Film4 Summary: Japan’s contemporay nightmares are domesticated in this allegorical family drama dirrected and co-written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Review: No matter in what genre he works, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Charisma, Pulse, Bright Future) is Japan’s undisputed king of blank, using such a coolly dispassionate and aloof style to usher in…
Although already well-established as the director and star of many two-reelers, it was not until 1923 that vaudeville comedian Buster Keaton got to write, direct, produce and star in his first feature film, Three Ages – which, to placate a studio nervous about entrusting a long-form project to a man whose directorial track record did…
Final Days (Alone) first published by VODzilla.co With zombie films, it is often the little differences that count. The fact that Johnny Martin’s Final Days (aka Alone, aka Pandemic) concerns a young man having to survive alone a global pandemic that reduces its victims to flesh-eaters might recall Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), loosely…
In Gonzalo Calzada‘s Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night (Nocturna – Lado A – La Noche del Hombre Grande, 2021), Alzheimer’s-addled nonagenarian Ulises (played by Pepe Soriano, and by Jenaro Nouet as a child) reconciled himself to half-remembered guilt, regret and loss over one long, dark night of the soul in the…
In Swan View, on the eastern outskirts of Perth where the boundaries between city and bush are ill-defined, the corpse of 18-year-old Tracey Myers has been found. Tracey is the Laura Palmer of Western Australian suburbia – a high school girl who had her whole future ahead of her, but also a junkie on a…