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 Djinn first published by Sight and Sound, Nov 2021 Review: On “a quiet summer night, 1989…”, young Dylan Jacobs (Ezra Dewey) is woken in his bed by the sound of his mother Michelle (Tevy Poe) sobbing. As he heads down the hall, she turns, and the candle illuminating the kitchen in otherworldy orange is…
Milly (Alexander Molina) is about to shoot himself in the foot. Even as he listens on his phone’s speaker to an intimate voicemail from his heavily pregnant girlfriend Emily (Monette Moio) declaring her love for him, he is getting a hand job in the front seat of his car from prostitute Kalli (Audra Alexander), and then…
As its very title implies, Remnants is about traces, souvenirs and skeletons in the closet – those things left behind, whether material or psychological, by something that has passed. At the short film’s centre is a polaroid – that most ephemeral kind of photographic record – and a keepsake box, buried as a time capsule…
“Sometimes people just need solitude, you know,” says Eric Black (Tom Hughes) in writer/director Russell Owen’s Shepherd. Eric is explaining what has drawn him to become sole resident – apart from his dog Baxter and hundreds of sheep – on a remote coast island. His addressee, the gruff, half-sighted boat woman Fisher (Kate Dickie) who…
Johnny Guitar first published by Little White Lies, as entry 136 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column A stranger wanders into a divided community. This is the plot of George Stevens’ iconic oater Shane (1953), as its eponymous gunfighter drifts into a local dispute and sides with the wholesome, homespun underdogs, before moving on, injured, into…
Suburbia & The Boys Next Door first published by Little White Lies, as entry 135 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “May 10th, 1968. Mark and I are going to be very happy here. The air is clean, skies are blue, and all the houses are brand new and beautiful. They call it suburbia and that…
Its title is the Spanish word for ‘friend’, and it opens with a Biblical quote on friendship: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). Accordingly, Óscar Martín’s feature debut Amigo, which he co-wrote with his stars David Pareja and Javier Botet, is indeed a…
In the last phase of his career, one-time blockbusting actor Bruce Willis has become a regular collaborator with indie writer/director Edward Drake (Broil, 2020). As well as co-writing John Suits’ Anti-Life (2020) and Chuck Russell’s Paradise City (2022) as vehicles for Willis, Drake himself has directed Willis in American Siege (2021), Apex (2021), Cosmic Sin…
Director’s Intention, transcript of introduction to a screening at the London Korean Film Festival 2022 “Your name goes on top of the ending credit, but it doesn’t mean it’s all yours. All the others care about the movie as much as you do.” This is what, some way into Kim Min-geun’s feature Director’s Intention, the…
We have all seen it in those videos that regularly surface showing a racist attack, say in a subway or on a public bus. An individual or gang singles out a person of colour to subject to a bombardment of racial slurs or worse in front of a captive audience. Maybe a third party intervenes,…
Breathing Happy has its European première at Soho Horror Film Festival 2022 “I’m at one year sober today. I dunno, technically I’m not gonna get it until another hour and 40 minutes, but even I can’t fuck that up, right? I miss you guys. Merry Christmas.” This is the voicemail message that Dylan Bradley leaves…