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…
Depraved had its world première at on 20th March, 2019 at What the Fest!? “You’re so pale. What are you, like a vampire or something?” This is what, a good way into Depraved, Shelley (Addison Timlin) asks the taciturn, heavily scarred stranger (Adam Breaux) with whom she has started drinking in a South Brooklyn bar. Shelley…
The Wilson family – Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Ewan Alex) – are visiting Santa Cruz for their summer vacation. It is a place where, as a child a little over three decades earlier, Adelaide (Madison Curry) had strayed into a fun fair’s…
Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna) first published by VODzilla.co One year after he made Demons (1985), director Lamberto Bava returned to his reflexive formula, where film itself becomes the medium of a diabolical uprising. Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna) is, improbably, a true sequel (as well as a rehash), set after the complete…
This is not a review as such of Haunting of Hill House, but rather a Twitter thread – or a ghost stor(if)y – that attempts to tease out a recurring (and transforming) theme, summarisable in a single but polysemic word, that runs through the structure of Mike Flanagan’s series. Have you ever watched a film…
Canaries (aka Alien Party Crashers) first published by SciFiNow As often as not the key to low-budget filmmaking is to think globally but act locally. So while Peter Stray’s feature debut Canaries (aka Alien Party Crashers) eventually settles into a parochial alien invasion comedy on New Year’s Eve, 2014 in the lower half of the…
For the love of cheap thrills: gonzo auteurism and The Evil Dead first published by Little White Lies Although he had been making amateur Super-8 films for years with childhood friend Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi had only just turned 20 when he started shooting his feature debut The Evil Dead in late 1979, and was, in…
The Baby first published by Little White Lies, as entry 66 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “I don’t mind telling you, Mrs Wadsworth, that I made a special effort to get this assignment,” says Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) near the beginning of The Baby. “It was impossible not to be interested.” Rubbernecking viewers who have…
Horrors of Malformed Men first published by Little White Lies, as entry 65 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “This story begins in a grey room,” intones our protagonist Hirosuke Hitomu (Teruo Yoshida). It is 1925, and Hirosuke, as disoriented as we are, finds himself in a cell otherwise filled with babbling, half-naked women, one of…
Scanners first published by VODzilla.co There is something cold and clinical about David Cronenberg’s Scanners. It is not just the film’s Montreal and Toronto locations – a mall, lecture rooms, corporate buildings, laboratories and a doctor’s office – but also the dead-eyed performance of Stephen Lack, whose protagonist Cameron Vale is disoriented and disengaged from…
Demons first published by VODzilla.co Demons (Dèmoni) is set in Berlin, in the Deep Eighties (you can tell by Claudio Simonetti’s synth pop). Music student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) is on the S-Bahn, clutching her score for Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, when the lights dip in a tunnel, and she glimpses the reflection of a man with…
Upgrade first published by Little White Lies The second film (after 2015’s Insidious: Chapter 3) to be written and directed by Leigh Whannell, Upgrade opens with a contradiction. After the names of the film’s various production companies, and even its title, are read out in a Siri-like voice to the accompaniment of CG imagery, we…