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…
Gemini published exclusively for Projected Figures Originally associated with the Noughties mumblecore movement, writer/director Aaron Katz makes films – Dance Party, USA (2006), Quiet City (2007), Cold Weather (2010), Land Ho! (2014) – that, in both their setting and sensibility, could not be further from Hollywood. His latest, however, unfolds in the dark heart of…
Cure first published by LWLies, as the 56th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “It’s not good to work too hard. You look sicker than your wife to me.” In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (Kyua), police detective Takabe (played by Koji Yakusho, in his first of many rôles for Kurosawa) is told this by the psychiatrist…
At First Light first published by SciFiNow “How about you try to be a teenager for one night, and then you can go back to being a single mom in the morning?” So 17-year-old Sean (Théodore Pellerin, The OA) is told near the beginning of At First Light(aka First Light). Abandoned years ago by his…
Pimped first published by SciFiNow Pimped opens with its action framed. Through the window of a yellow-lit door, we see blue-lit revellers in the room beyond, dancing to Peaches’ Fuck the Pain Away. DP Josh Flavell’s camera slowly pulls outs to reveal, on this side of the door, a tuxedoed Lewis (Benedict Samuel) telling Kenneth…
Luciferina first published by SciFiNow It begins – and ends – at the beginning. The latest film from writer/director Gonzalo Calzada, whose previous Resurrection (2015) has proven Argentina’s most watched horror, Luciferina opens with a CG representation of a spermatozoon fertilising an egg – and it (literally) climaxes with a ‘big bang’, and the cycle of…
Lasso first published by SciFiNow When, in John Landis’ The Blues Brothers (1980), Jake and Eliot roll up at Bob’s Country Bunker claiming to be booked artists the Good Ol’ Boys, half the joke is the absurdity of seeing an urban rhythm and blues band having to impersonate a country-and-western outfit. Though more horror than…
Rock Steady Row first published by SciFiNow First there was Bicycle Thieves (1948); then Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Messenger (1994), Beijing Bicycle (2001) and Stray Dogs (2004); and now there is a new kid on the block. seeking – and earning – initiation into the exclusive fraternity of films about stolen bicycles. Bikes and their theft…
Dementia Part II first published by SciFiNow If Mike Testin’s Dementia (2015) was a serious, slow-burning domestic thriller in which an ageing, demented Vietnam War hero is revisited by his questionable past in the form of a vindictive bunny-boiling home carer, then Dementia Part II – co-directed by Testin and its star Matt Mercer – is…
Death Laid An Egg first published by Sight & Sound, Nov 2018 “Now we want to try to conceptualise the chicken as the principal actor in the drama of modern life,” says advertising agent Mondaini (Jean Sobieski). “We’ll take them by surprise with an approach that’s absolutely new, that’s newer than tomorrow, preposterously new.” Mondaini’s…
Possum first published by Sight & Sound, November 2018 Review: There is a subgenre of cinema – the ‘muttering man movie’ – in which an extremely alienated, barely articulate male is caught claustrophobically in an environment that reflects his inner states, both concealing and exposing the secrets of a damaged psyche. Key examples include David…
Mandy first published by Sight & Sound, Nov 2018 Review: It is hard to define what constitutes a cult film, as the label typically refers not so much to content as to the kind of niche yet devoted audience that a film has acquired over time: adoring hipsters who happily return to the scene of…