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 Furies first published by SciFiNow A terrified woman runs through Australian bushland, pursued by a grotesquely masked man with a scythe who, when about to kill her, is himself attacked – and eviscerated – by another masked man who then carries the woman off. We do not yet know what exactly is going on…
That the end is near for Eli Cody (the great Sonny Carl Davis), also known by his stage name Buck Alamo, is clear from the beginning of writer/director Ben Epstein’s feature debut Buck Alamo, in which a voiceover from Death himself (Bruce Dern) promises the ‘ballad’ of his memorable ‘duel’ with ol’ Buck. Indeed the…
“There are only three things you must never, and I mean never, forget. I call it The Commandments of Waste Recycling. The first commandment: thou shalt never be sloppy with the recycling. The second commandment: be progressive, be effective. The third commandment: sloppiness in recycling shall never occur!” The speaker is a hospital’s Cleaning…
It is a dark and stormy night, and right from the get-go, Erik Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes To Midnight is clearly going to be a genre film. First, there is the fact that it opens with the arrival of Caroline Williams, whose breakout rôle was playing the DJ Vanita ‘Stretch’ Brock in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas…
Salon Kitty first published by Movie Gazette, April 2005 Berlin at the outbreak of World War II. Following orders from his superiors which he hopes to turn to his own political advantage, SS Officer Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) establishes a brothel for use by Nazi officials and foreign dignitaries, and selects a group of twenty…
Time of the Wolf first published, in a version here modified, by Movie Gazette, November 2003 Michael Haneke has built himself a reputation for making films that are uncompromising (Benny’s Video, Funny Games, The Piano Teacher), and even the opening credits of Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup) reflect a refusal to make…
The Wind first published by VODzilla.co Emma Tammi’s feature debut The Wind opens with an impressionistic sequence, its events shuffled out of order. Two men wait outside a prairie house. A woman, Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard) emerges, her white smock covered in blood, carrying a baby wrapped in cloth – but while we hear the…
Survival Skills (2020) at Fantasia There are few things more political than the police. This is especially true right now in the United States, where every week more phone or bodycam footage emerges showing the constabulary putting their knees on civilians’ throats, or simply shooting them dead, often with little more obvious cause than the…
Undergods (2020) at Fantasia “Maria tells me you write,” says Hans (Eric Godon), some way into Chino Moya’s feature debut Undergods. “What about?” “Possible worlds,” replies Johann (Tadhg Murphy) “I don’t think you’ll get it. Maria says you don’t read much.” What neither of these two men – nor indeed Hans’ daughter Maria (Tanya Reynolds)…
Minor Premise (2020) at Fantasia The protagonist in Eric Schultz’s feature debut Minor Premise, Ethan (Sathya Sridharan), is – much like all of us – an individual full of contradictions. The scion and natural successor of world-renowned neuroscientist Paul Kochar (Nikolas Konotomanolis), Ethan is also a jealous, resentful son with serious Oedipal issues who would…
The Block Island Sound has its World Première at Fantasia The Block Island Sound, the latest feature from writer/directors Kevin and Matthew McManus, opens with a blank screen, accompanied by the cries of seagulls, the soothing waves of an ocean’s lapping waters, and a low, loud animalistic growl that is harder to identify among these…