Stanislaus

Imaginary friends will be most appreciated by those who had an IF in their childhood, only to forget it later under the wave of adult responsibilities. It can also appeal to child audiences who will like the peculiar characters of the IFs and the whole colourful world. A world that seemed a little underdeveloped in places. Cal's background wasn't surprising in the end, and for a viewer who has already seen more than one film, it will be clear from quite early on. There are a number of films about coping with the loss of loved ones through various fantasy planes or realities, and IF takes a fairly low-key approach to the subject, but within that theme, the films that appealed to me more were those that went into more dramatic depth, like A Monster Calls or Bridge to Terabithia.

The first Shazam! was a pretty nice and unpretentious flick, but Fury of the Gods, unfortunately, flirts with moments of awkwardness for a noticeable part of its running time, offering a predictable and overly instructive story about the importance of family (and no, it's not another Fast and Furious). It also has reprehensibly overlong running time and, at times, rather poor CGI. Fury of the Gods wants to be fun and brisk, but it fails badly. In this case, I'm not so sorry that I didn't catch the film in the cinema and watched it in the end thanks to Netflix.

I'm definitely not a fan of spiders, but my curiosity lured me to the cinema to see Infested, as I have a bit of a thing for animal horror movies (about overgrown crocodiles, snakes, boars, sharks, etc.). Sébastien Vaniček's film impresses with a soundtrack I would have expected in a film about drugs or the mafia rather than deadly eight-legged creatures - though drugs are often mentioned. As far as the action-horror level is concerned, it works on the whole; here I would highlight especially the scene with the flashing corridor, which gave me solid goosebumps. But the overall experience is noticeably marred by the characters and their actions, it was really hard to root for them to escape the "web of death".