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…
At the centre of Parallel Minds is a classic locked-room mystery. Some time not far into the future, Elise Perrott (Michelle Thrush) and her research assistant Margo Elson (Tommie-Amber Pirie) are racing to complete a pioneering technology called Red Eye – special contact lenses which enable people both to download their memories into a Universal…
“This had better be fucking good,” says police officer Catrin (Annes Elwy) at the beginning of Ryan Andrew Hooper’s feature debut The Toll, as she steps into the portable cabin where the Toll Booth Man (Michael Smiley) conducts his business. The latter – a dry, taciturn anonym – has been leading an equally anonymous life,…
On a desolate goat farm out in rural Thurber, Texas, the Straker family’s elderly patriarch David (Michael Zagst) lies in bed, ill and dying. Yet it is not just death that stalks this property in Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked. For something is spooking the goats in their barn at night, and between…
“I can’t breathe,” 19-year-old Talib Ben Hassi (Jack Pedersen) shouts repeatedly, as police officers hold him down in a cell. With those three words right at the beginning of Shorta, writer/directors’ Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm evoke the phrase used by Eric Garner and many other African-Americans before they died at the hands of…
“Do you remember what it was like in the beginning, before all of this?”, Allison (Aubrey Plaza, Life After Beth) will ask near the end of Black Bear written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine whose previous feature, Wild Canaries (2014), also boasted a bestial title. “We were so happy,” Allison continues, “I just want…
Keane first published by musicOMH Two people sit on a bench at a train station, in what will probably be the last few moments they share before parting company forever. “It’s okay, I love you”, she says. “I love you too”, he replies, a single tear rolling down his cheek. This might be the closing…
“Are you sure you want to keep it?”, 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) asks Anna (Carla Philip Røder), the pregnant girlfriend of her cousin David (Elliott Crosset Hove), in Jeanette Nordahl’s feature debut Wildland. “Maybe he doesn’t even want to be a dad.” It is a peculiarly inappropriate thing to ask a young, excitedly expectant…
Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s feature debut opens with actual black-and-white newsreel footage of pioneering Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin arriving in Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb of Paris, before a cheering crowd of Caucasian locals. There, in 1963, he ceremonially inaugurated a housing project that bore his name, the Cité Gagarine – a groundbreaking socialist hero…
“What is it about the suburbs?”, wonders Mary (Deanna Russo) aloud in The Ice Cream Truck, as the driver of an actual ice cream truck waves to her from the street. There is something hyperreal, dare one say it, ‘Lynchian’, about this scene – the perfect houses, the immaculate lawns, the sunny skies, and that…
The Host first published by VODzilla.co “This is a very unusual and very disturbing case.” So says the perplexed psychiatrist (Derek Jacobi), pouring himself a stiff drink before returning to his desk to face an unseen patient. “You seem to have been having dreams. Anxiety dreams…. Please tell me everything, from the beginning.” Indeed, amid…
The Reflecting Skin first published by VODzilla.co The Reflecting Skin begins with little Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) carrying a large frog across a yellow field, and, with help from his friends Eben (Codie Lucas) and Kim (Evan Hall), inflating it with a reed and leaving it in the road. When the adult Dolphin Blue (Lindsay…