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…
“Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina 2101 AD”, reads the caption that opens I Am Toxic (Soy tóxico) as we witness a sea of corpses in an arid landscape, and hear the sound of buzzing, feeding flies. A middle-aged, bearded man (Esteban Prol) wakes in their midst, and if we are disoriented by all that we…
As the title suggests, game playing is key to Macarena García Lenzi and Martín Blousson’s Rock, Paper and Scissors (Piedra, papel y tijera), from a screenplay by the directors and their co-writers Julieta García Lenzi and Valentín Javier Diment (The Rotten Link). In a multi-storey house in contemporary Argentina, María José (Valeria Giorcelli) and her…
This Transient Life (Mujô) first published by Little White Lies, as the 64th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Did you see Masao?” 21-year-old Yuri asks the house boy Iwashita near the beginning of Akio Jissôji’s This Transient Life (Mujô). “He’s in a rush these days,” Iwashita replies. “Today too.” It is clear, already, that…
InControl first published by SciFiNow The first time we see Samantha (Anja Savcic) in writer/director Kurtis David Harder’s InControl, she is facing a mirror. This follows a prologue in which pretty cheerleader Marissa (Sarah Troyer) tries desperately – and vainly – to phone Mark and Jenny, before, in her distraction, flipping her car spectacularly. The…
Child’s Play first published (in a shorter version) by Sight & Sound, August 2019 Review: Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play opens with a diptych of scenes: first a to-camera announcement from Henry Kaslan (Tim Matheson), founder and CEO of Kaslan Corporation, about his company’s range of high-tech Buddi dolls, which learn from their environment and can,…
Director Kiah Roache-Turner and his co-writer/brother Tristan first exploded into the genre scene with their feature debut Wyrmwood (2014), which fuel-injected the putrescent zombie genre with some Mad Max-style motorheadedness and outrageous post-apocalyptic ass-kicking. Now they are back with Nekrotronic, this time giving the well-worn tropes of demonology a much needed update to the online…
Fido first published by Little White Lies In an alternative early 1960s America where humans have contained a nationwide undead menace, domesticated zombie Fido (Billy Connolly) has a transformative effect on his adoptive family, making up for the inadequacies of dad Bill (Dylan Baker) to his unloved son Timmy (K’Sun Ray) and neglected wife Helen…
Takeshis’ first published by Film4 Summary: Japan’s busiest all-rounder Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano plays both himself and his loser double in a surreally self-flagellating examination of his career to date. Review: In his twelfth directorial feature, Takeshi Kitano turns inwards with the infuriatingly reflexive Takeshis’, wherein the different strands of his own personality, and the tensions between them,…
The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun) first published by Film4 Summary: In this strange comedy-cum-musical-cum-cum, loneliness and longing pervade drought-stricken Taipei – and there are hardcore sex acts and watermelons, too. Tsai Ming-liang directs. Review: “Watermelon can open your heart.” So says a television announcer near the beginning of Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Wayward Cloud (Tian…
One Deadly Summer (L’été meurtrier) first published by Movie Gazette One Deadly Summer (L’été meurtrier) begins as a portrait of life in a small village in 1970s France. The narration of local fireman Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon) introduces us to his French-Italian family and describes his awkward crush on Elle (Isabelle Adjani), a pretty girl who…
Redwood first published by SciFiNow As British musician Josh (Mike Beckingham) and his girlfriend Beth (Tatjana Nardone) drive into the Redwood National Park for some time together away from it all, several dark shadows are being cast over their trip. Firstly there is Josh’s recent diagnosis of terminal leukaemia, meaning that, despite all Beth’s desperate…