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…
The text with which Wander opens offers a dedication to “all indigenous, black, and people of color who are targeted and have been displaced through border control on stolen land”, and expresses a desire to “expose government violences, propel change and honor the voices of those who have been silenced.” Sure enough, the film opens…
Gwendoline first published by Film4 Summary: Just (Emmanuelle) Jaeckin’s final film, a comedy adventure romp based on a bondage cartoon strip from the 1940s, is surprisingly coy about its sex, if entirely unreserved about its B-grade status. Review: ‘The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline’ was one of four adult comic series written by John Willie (real name…
Journalist Camilla (Kristi Lovas) has decided to make a documentary about the psychics who often help police with criminal investigations. Camilla is open-minded on the issue, but her cameraman Thomas (unseen, and played by the film’s writer/director Tomas Sem Løkke-Sørensen) believes that all psychics are frauds, and seems far more interested in Camilla herself. Yet…
After they have gang-banged a female member of the student body, the boys at Whiton University’s Sig Nu Pi fraternity like to mark her online account with an exclamation point. This choice of punctuation comes with a lewd pictographic connotation – explained by fratboy Beau (Gattlin Griffith) near the beginning of John Berardo’s Initiation (aka…
Daniel C. Nyiri’s Confession opens with the introduction of two separate characters. Dean McCallum (Gavin Lyall) is a good-natured, generous, well-liked man about town, and a literature professor with a drily ironic wit. And depressive 26-year-old Heather Kadar (Jo Kuzelka) is seeing a therapist about her sense of guilt, trauma and confusion over having miraculously…
A Swedish Love Story (En kärlekshistoria) first published by EyeforFilm In 1970, Erich Segal’s novel Love Story was the top-selling work of fiction in the US, while in the same year Arthur Hiller’s film adaptation (with a screenplay by Segal) was the number one box office attraction. So when En Kärlekshistoria (literally ‘A Love Story’)…
Blinders first published by VODzilla.co We know from the outset of Blinders, co-written and directed by Tyler Savage (Inheritance, 2017), that its protagonist Andy (Vincent Van Horn), like most of us, lives much of his lonely life online. For the opening scenes are presented as video shot vertically on his smartphone, documenting his move from…
Dark Stories first published by Through the Trees Single mother Christine (Kristanna Loken, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003) comes under attack from a psychopathic Chucky-like semi-animated doll that has just been delivered to her home. Bound to a chair in the basement, she tells the knife-wielding mannequin a series of five ‘scary stories’…
Enhanced first published by VODzilla.co Hard-assed Sergeant George Shepherd (George Tchortov) leads a covert ops unit of soldiers with unusual weapons to hunt and contain a group of human ‘subjects’ who have escaped the Saisei corporation that enhanced their powers. Closing in on fugitive mechanic Anna (Alanna Bale), George begins to question whether he has…
Av: The Hunt first published by VODzilla.co The English title of Emre Akay’s Av: The Hunt is a bilingual reduplication (like Ju-on: The Grudge), with Av simply the Turkish for ‘hunting’. This is no doubt in part intended to distinguish it from Craig Zobel’s The Hunt (also 2020), but it also serves to show that…
Aquaslash first published by VODzilla.co Anyone who grew up in Australia – where the waterslide culture is strong – will have heard, and possibly been frightened by, the urban myth about delinquents sticking razor blades to the slide’s interior walls, and then watching the bloody mayhem that ensues. With Aquaslash, writer/director Renaud Gauthier builds an…