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…
Text of my onstage introduction to Birthday (Saeng-il), which screened at the London Korean Film Festival 2019 On the morning of 16 April, 2014, an 18-year-old, overladen ferry named the MV Sewol was travelling from Incheon to Jeju, when it listed heavily while making a course adjustment and started rapidly taking on water as it…
Text of an onstage introduction to The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale which I gave at the London Korean Film Festival 2019 These days, zombies are everywhere, and films about them have, like the creatures themselves, proliferated virally, overwhelming through their sheer numbers. It wasn’t always like this. In the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, their…
This is (more or less) the text from my onstage introduction to a screening of Idol (Woosang) at the London Korean Film Festival 2019 When it comes to spoilers, there’s an unwritten code that anything which happens in a film’s first third is fair game for advance disclosure and discussion – but that anything which…
A Good Woman Is Hard To Find cements director Abner Pastoll’s already secure reputation as a sure hand with character-driven genre cinema, following his Franco-English psychochiller Road Games (Fausse Route, 2014) and twisty chase short Getaway Driver (2017). This time around, working from a screenplay by Ronan Blaney, Pastoll merges the social realism of Ken…
It’s not every film that is prefaced with text showing a legitimate toll-free number to call (in Canada) “if you or someone you know might be at risk of self-harm or self-injury” – but then, Dead Dicks opens with a graphic depiction of suicide, as Richie (Heston Horwin, Rock Steady Row), alone among the fractured…
Sexy Killer (Sexykiller, morirás por ella) first published by VODzilla.co In a university locker room, as female undergraduates in various states of undress gossip maliciously about one another’s sex lives, a figure in mask and black robes watches and waits for his opportunity. With machete in hand, he finds each shower cubicle frustratingly empty, until…
Piercing first published by VODzilla.co Piercing opens, and indeed closes, with an external shot of buildings, as the camera zooms and cranes past the windows of different apartments, each containing its own cellular family, and stories within storeys. Of course the film – Nicholas Pesce’s second feature, following his monochrome serial killer debut The Eyes…
The Stendhal Syndrome (La Sindrome di Stendhal) first published by VODzilla.co The Stendhal Syndrome (La Sindrome di Stendhal) was the second film by Dario Argento to star his daughter Asia. The title of the first, Trauma (1993), might equally have served here, given that The Stendhal Syndrome focuses less on its rapist/killer than on the…
Horror Express first publsihed by Little White Lies, as the part 75 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column The novella Who Goes There?, published in 1934 by John W. Campbell Jr. under his pen name Don A. Stewart, has left a considerable mark on cinema First there was Christian Nyby’s loose adaptation The Thing From Another…
Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl first published by VODzilla.co “That street with all the Victorians?” asks Beth (Quinn Shephard) upon hearing where her new friend Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is staying in town. “Strange cats, those Victorians. You know what they used to do for fun? Dress up in weird costumes and pose for each other.Tableaux vivants….
Finale first published by SciFiNow Taking place (mostly) in an isolated petrol station on the night that the Danish football team is playing in the finals of the European Championship, Finale sets itself up as a familiar – indeed timeless – tale of predatory victimisation. The station owner’s daughter Agnes (Anne Bergfeld) and disgruntled employee…