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…
Bad Things had its world première at Tribeca Film Festival 2023 Bad Things opens with a blonde woman carrying a chainsaw from a building across the snow to a car full of her friends. The woman is Ruthie Nodd (Gayle Rankin), the building is the hotel ‘Comley Suites’ in America’s Northeast that she has just…
Tremors first published by Little White Lies, as entry 157 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Ron Underwood’s Tremors opens with Valentine McKee (Kevin Bacon) standing on the edge of a rocky cliff, and urinating onto the ground far below. He is first shown from the front in an extra wide shot too distant to allow…
Earwig (2021) Earwig first published by Sight and Sound, Summer 2022, as was the appended sidebar on other films by Lucile Hadzihalilovic Synopsis: Europe, the mid-1950s. Albert Scellinc ensures that the icy false teeth of his young ward Mia are regularly replaced. This routine is unsettled by instructions to ready Mia for her new home,…
The Black Phone first published by Little White Lies It is 1978, in North Denver, and Little Leaguer Finney Shaw (Mason Thomas), on the cusp of adolescence, is living in constant terror – and not just the usual teen angst about whether he can attract the attention of the girl he likes in his class…
“The end is coming, but we’re here to stay” go the lyrics of the song that plays over the prologue to George Henry Horton’s Project Dorothy. That prologue comprises an impressionistic montage of white coats working in a massive facility, and then a ringing alarm and a tannoy announcement of security lockdown, and finally the…
“You already know why I’m here,” says a woman in a white wedding dress to an enthroned, horned Satan, in the opening scene of writer/director Julian Gowdy’s debut feature The Devil’s Tongue. “You held up your end of the deal, so now it’s my turn. My only hope is that you – fuck!” Here, before…
Writer/director Charlotte Le Bon’s debut feature Falcon Lake opens with a wide shot – or as wide as is possible in squared-off Academy ratio – of an idyllic lake at dusk. As insects can be heard buzzing with life, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal something closer to death: a human body floating still…
Transformers: Dark of the Moon first published by EyeforFilm, 1 July 2011 Cast your mind back to 9/11. Lost for words to express the enormity of the horrific spectacle unfolding on their screens if not before their very eyes, people kept incredulously repeating the mantra: “It’s like something out of a movie.” Well, Transformers: Dark…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen first published by EyeforFilm, 15 June, 2009 A title baldly declares that the film we are about to see has its origins in Hasbro toys. Over images of a one-sided battle between men and mechas in a rocky landscape, a booming voice-over declares: “Earth – birthplace of the human race…
Transformers first published by EyeForFilm “Cool, mum!” says the little boy in the passenger seat of a car as above him two towering robots fight each other, in the process destroying anything (vehicles, pylons, the freeway itself) that gets in their way. The mother, needless to say, looks less pleased.Little boys are certainly one target…
Freshly released from a mental institution, a young, taciturn ‘Man’ (Rory Alexander) with a history of violence and a head full of elusive childhood memories heads back to the only people he knows – the fatherly Dunleavy (Mark Rylance), plus old playmates Daisy (Nell Williams) and Toby (Sebastian Orozco). Yet in writer/director Fridtjof Ryder’s first…