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…
“You’re bloody neolithic!” Grace (Rebecca Palmer) shouts at her husband Abel (Eoin Slattery) in Dan Gitsham and Sophie Mair’s short film The Thing That Ate The Birds. Abel barely responds – and that is precisely the problem between this couple who are no longer even sharing a bed, and whose other communications are practically non-existent….
Tezuka’s Barbara first published by Little White Lies, as the 130th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Following the publication of his groundbreaking New Treasure Island in 1947 which ushered in the Golden Age of manga, Osamu Tezuka would, with his popular series like AstroBoy, Princess Knight and Kimba the White Lion, become known variously…
See For Me fist published by Movies On Weekends There is a loose subgenre of home invasion films in which the victims become trapped as much by their disability as by their domestic location – until they find eventual empowerment precisely in their disempowerment. In Walter Grauman’s A Lady In A Cage (1964), Olivia Havilland’s…
The Filmmaker’s House first published by Little White Lies “Sometimes hospitality can go too far. In the story of Lot, he actually offers his daughters to the strangers that arrive at his house.” So says documentarian Marc Isaacs some way into his latest feature The Filmmaker’s House. Unable to get financing for any documentary that…
Superdeep (Kolskaya sverhglubokaya) first published by VODzilla.co Anna (Milena Radulovic) is an epidemiologist whose colleague haemorrhaged to death before her eyes after volunteering himself as a human guinea pig for a vaccine that had not yet been properly tested even on animals. It is an event which has left Anna distrustful both of the authorities…
Basic Instinct first published by Little White Lies, as the 129th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum coulmn The plots of Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me (1971), Edward Bianchi’s The Fan (1981) and Eckhart Schmidt’s similarly titled Der Fan (1982) may already have revolved around obsessive stalkers – but it was Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction…
Shapeless first published by Movies On Weekends Shapeless opens in the bathroom of a run-down New Orleans apartment, and will return there repeatedly. This is the most private space of Ivy – the place where her naked body is exposed, at least to her own unforgiving eyes, and also evacuated. Played by Kelly Murtagh (who…
Ben Wheatley on In The Earth first published (in a slightly different format) by Sight & Sound, Summer Edition 2021 Seeded from small beginnings, the filmmaking career of Ben Wheatley has grown steadily. He has gone from making viral online comedy clips and animated shorts in the early Noughties to ever larger rôles contributing to…
The Amusement Park first published by Little White Lies Ushering in – along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby from the same year – a new Golden Age of horror that would last throughout the following decade, George A. Romero’s 1968 feature debut Night of the Living Dead shifted horror from the gothic castle to America’s…
Flashback (aka The Education of Fredrick Fitzell) first published by VODzilla.co Near the beginning of Flashback, aka The Education of Fredrick Fitzell, Fredrick (Dylan O’Brien) is interviewed for a job by Evelyn (Amanda Brugel). “So I see here a bit of schooling in visual arts”, she says, looking at his résumé. “Yeah,” Fred replies, “that’s,…
Jumbo first published by Sight & Sound, Summer Eddition 2021 Review: After a title sequence written in flickering blue, green and red letters, writer/director Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo begins with a strange vision: a young woman stands, her back to the camera, and opens her arms in ecstatic surrender to brightly-hued lights rapidly circling in the…