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…
A terrified woman runs in the forest, before falling over as she looks back and hitting her head. A man chops timber outdoors for firewood, intercut with shots of the same man plugging his smartphone into a massive mainframe computer. Nate Strayer’s Outlier, which he co-wrote with Jona Doug, begins with this confusion of images,…
The Last Days of Capitalism begins with a moment of intimacy: impressionistic, soft-focus close-ups of a couple in the bliss of sexual congress, their two bodies become one. Yet in keeping with the title of Adam Mervis’ feature debut, this relationship is also entirely transactional, and doomed to come to an end. Not that…
We Need to Do Something had its UK première at Celluloid Screams 2021 “Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in No Exit (Huis clos, 1944), his play about a trio of ideologically incompatible people trapped in a room together for eternity. A similar principle underlies Sean King O’Grady’s We Need To Do Something, adapted…
When I Consume You had its UK première at Celluloid Screams 2021 Perry Blackshear‘s feature debut They Look Like People (2015) featured two friends, played by Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews, working together through the demons and delusions of mental illness. So when, some way into Blackshear’s third film When I Consume You, David Castille…
Basenji screens at Cine-Excess 2021 The Basenji is a breed of dog from Central Africa whose name derives from the word for ‘savage’, whose ‘bark’ is more like a high-pitched yodel, and whose attitude towards strangers is reserved. Although a regular barking dog does briefly feature, there is no actual Basenji to be found in…
Below is the text of my introduction to a screening of Luck Chan-sil at the London Korean Film Festival 2020 Welcome to this screening of Lucky Chan-sil, which is one of the films that I have programmed for the Cinema Now Strand of the London Korean Film Festival. Lucky Chan-sil is the feature debut of…
At the end of Evin has its English première at Cine-Excess “A girl or a boy?” asks Amen, after her new friend Nilo (Shabnam Dadkhah) has just told her that someone recently tried to jump to their death from the overpass that they are crossing. “Does it make any difference?”, replies Nilo. These questions, it…
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair UK première at Grimmfest 2021 We’re All Going To The World’s Fair begins with an initiatory ritual of sorts. After nervously rehearsing her introduction a couple of times, Casey (extraordinary newcomer Anna Cobb) sits alone at the desk in her neon-lit attic bedroom with her stuffed monkey Poe…
The Righteous had its UK première at Grimmfest 2021 “I have done wrong within my eyes and yours,” says Frederic Mason (Henry Czerny), praying on his knees in a triangle of light at the beginning of writer/director Mark O’Brien’s feature debut The Righteous. “In your ultimate jurisdiction, as always, I am at your mercy. My…
The Deep House screened at Grimmfest 2021 “Everything’s weird underwater,” says Ben (James, son of Mick, Jagger) some way into The Deep House. He is a historian turned YouTuber who likes to film himself and his girlfriend Tina (Camille Rowe) visiting supposedly haunted ruins – but as his videos fail to get enough hits to…
The Pizzagate Massacre (aka Duncan) had its international première at Grimmfest 2021 In the opening sequence of writer/director/editor/producer/composer John Valley’s feature, a reporter (Derek Babb) addresses the camera about recent incidents of mass murder in Texas linked to a debunked conspiracy theory, and about footage shot by an eyewitness which would “introduce the world to…