Gemini published exclusively for Projected Figures Originally associated with the Noughties mumblecore movement, writer/director Aaron Katz makes films – Dance Party, USA (2006), Quiet City (2007), Cold Weather (2010), Land Ho! (2014) – that, in both their setting and sensibility, could not be further from Hollywood. His latest, however, unfolds in the dark heart of…
King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen first published by SciFiNow The documentary King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen comes with a certain anxiety about oblivion. First there is that title, modelled on the self-consciously lurid form of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold World of Ozploitation! (2008),…
Attack of the Adult Babies first published by SciFiNow The opening credits to Attack of the Adult Babies, the latest northern genre film to be helmed by Emmerdale-veteran Dominic Brunt (Before Dawn, Bait), appear in bold red over tracking shots through a large and well-furnished manor house – a house apparently empty until a giggling woman…
Mayhem first published by SciFiNow Derek Cho (Steven Yeun) is having a bad day. Essentially a good guy, if driven by ambition, he has been steadily climbing the corporate ladder as a loophole expert at Towers and Smythe Consulting, while slowly losing his soul. This morning, for example, when Melanie Cross (Samara Weaving) meets him begging…
Tampopo first published by Little White Lies, as Part 32 of my column Cinema Psychotronicum Today the label ‘ramen western’ evokes such Eastern oaters as Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Sadik Ahmed’s The Last Thakur (2008) and Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), which reclaim and renationalise what the spaghetti western had…
Body Melt first published by VODzilla.co After founding and leading the experimental multimedia outfit →↑→ throughout the late Seventies and Eighties, in 1988 Philip Brophy splattered his audiovisual assaults onto celluloid with his short feature Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, an avant-garde reduction of everyday human experience to the ingestion, issue and exchange of bodily fluids –…
The Belko Experiment first published by Little White Lies Welcome to Belko Enterprises. A big American office building “in the middle of nowhere” – or more precisely on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia – where white-collar types punch in every day to facilitate other workers getting other jobs, and in exchange for labours that they never…
Anitiviral first published by Sight & Sound Review: “She’s perfect somehow,” says Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), selling a dream to his rapt customer – and like the best salesmen, Syd believes his own pitch, even if that modifier “somehow” allows for certain flaws. With his designer suit and scarf, his slicked back hair and his…
Lowlife Love first published by Little White Lies, as part 20 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Tetsuo (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) wakes up beside a would-be starlet, vainly attempts to have sex with her again, and then, after she leaves, proceeds to masturbate to the CV that she has left with him. In Lowlife Love (Gesu no ai, 2016),…
“This film is based on a true story…” declares text at the beginning of Egomaniac, about a female, independent filmmaker driven murderously crazy by her own cottage industry. The suspension points coming after that quote represent punctuation’s equivalent of a nod and a wink – a sly acknowledgement by writer/director Kate Shenton that initial claims…
First published (in a shorter version) by Little White Lies “Sometimes he found it difficult to believe in a future that had not already taken place.” In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, this line appears as a prefatory voice-over from protagonist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), who, three months after he has moved into the titular tower block,…