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…
Dying to Sleep opens at night and in medias res, with Mary Swanson (SarahLydia Sophia) dragging something heavy in a bag from her car to a house, only to spill its contents in shock as she is greeted at the door by family and friends for a surprise birthday party. While the darkness and Jesse…
Mami Wata, from Nigerian writer/director C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi (Juju Stories, 2021), opens on a beach. Even the brief textual introduction explaining who Mami Wata is – a water goddess worshipped “across West, Central and Southern Africa, and among the Afrikan diasporas of the Americas” – is superimposed over a vista of bubbling, glistening surf at…
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) at the BFI London Film Festival 2023 Some 35 years ago, Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki made the so-called underdog (or workers’) trilogy. Though otherwise unrelated to each other, his Shadows In Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990) all featured downtrodden protagonists struggling to find solidarity, love or revenge…
A text entry in a pseudo-biographical dictionary assigns the name ‘Nirmata’ to the architect of an advanced AI technology that has changed the world forever. This elusive figure, the titular ‘Creator’ who gives Gareth Edwards’ epic sci-fi feature its title, has acquired a semi-divine status from the mechanical beings that he has engendered and the…
On Fire begins with an aerial tracking shot, following a brown leaf as it flutters through the air, swept by a wind over a vast forest, before finally drifting down to the dry floor below. This is not unlike the opening shot from Gil Kenan’s animated feature Monster House (2006), where the fall of an…
My 13 contributions to A Great Horror From Every Year from 1922, first published by BFI, 28 October 2022 Includes capsules of: Nosferatu, The White Reindeer, Carnival of Souls, Onibaba, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Possession, Re-Animator, Cronos, Cure, A Tale of Two Sisters, Rec, Let The Right One In, Berberian Sound Studio Nosferatu (1922)…
The Most Dangerous Game first published by Little White Lies, as entry 162 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Irving Pichel and Ernest P. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game opens, appropriately enough, with an entrance – a huge wooden door, on which there is a carving of a bestial figure with vampiric fangs and an arrow…
The Day After Tomorrow first published by Movie Gazette, 26 Feb, 2004 In director Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), a boffin eventually defeats the space aliens that have wrought explosive havoc all over America (and incidentally the rest of the world) – without provocation. In Godzilla (1998), a boffin eventually defeats the giant iguana that…
Starting from the winter solstice, 21st December 2020, experienced documentarian Christopher Morris visited a barley field near Land’s End in Cornwall every day till the following winter solstice, tracing with his camera the seasonal, cyclical changes that occurred over these twelve months. Here, a year in a field is compressed into about 85 minutes, so…
“What makes a person do something like that?”, Special Agent Molcheck (Larry S. White) will ask as he picks up Dr Donald Thomas (Dean Cain) at the airport in Phoenix near the beginning of Condition of Return. We already know what the ‘something’ is, because the film’s prologue showed a visibly upset Eve (the ever…
Writer/director Mike Cheslik’s feature debut Hundreds of Beavers opens – and remains – in the wild frontier lands of around Lake Michigan, Wisconsin, some time during the 18th or 19th Century. There, Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) in many ways embodies the American Dream. For he is a rugged individualist and venture capitalist…