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Another wasted opportunity and another sterile contribution to the genre that should have been a horror slam-dunk. Itsy Bitsy is not terrible and at times it’s effective at combining the aura of The Conjuring and the threat of the eight-legged creature, but mostly it’s awfully boring and unoriginal. The four characters include two children, but you know nothing can happen to them, and the script is more interested in the drugged and unhappy mother than in the spider’s nest. A waste of time.

The premise alone is calling for immediate cult status, the execution, on the other hand, swings between a madhouse and a philosophical circle of recovering alcoholics – but there is something about it. Kevin Smith plays a rather impressive game between the victim and his sociopathic captor that does not lack a proper dose of morbidity, plus the wonderfully ignoble motivations of the villain, but he also ruins everything with comedy reliefs and the performance of Johnny Depp, which belongs to a completely different story. A more serious, and consequently more violent take on the material could have resulted in a horror gem, but what we have is nothing but provocative bizarreness with a wannabe message and dodgy humour, though with some strong moments and a brilliant idea.

An easygoing flick with a gang of likeable characters who are simply a showcase of the typical archetypes of American comedy, which actually lets you detach yourself even more from their crazy trip. This is nothing but a mindless ride on the wave of catchy music that fortunately lacks any cringe-worthy and tasteless attempts at humour at any price. Besides, Marisa Tomey is gorgeous and I could relate to the character of Dudley, I also have trouble sometimes keeping my balance on a bike, especially late at night on the way back from certain establishments.

The two greatest guilty-pleasure icons of today comparing the size of various body parts in a wisecrack-packed action flick from the director of John Wick and Deadpool and… it’s not fun? Before the screening, I obediently performed the process of brain paralysis, which let me have a lot of fun with some of the action scenes (the helicopter one at the end is awesome, really), but the rest runs somehow on fumes. Save for a couple of exceptions, the humour is very forced and it’s soon clear that these two brutes are better together in secondary roles, where they can sneer at each other for ten minutes and then give way to some proper jokes. The story, on the other hand, it’s low-brow junk salvaged from a couple of decades ago that goes by fast and brings some welcome diversity with Vanessa Kirby, but after so many Fast and Furious, the viewer has lost their naivete and won’t be very impressed by a black superman unable to destroy a semi-nude rugby team with a javelin. I looked forward to it, but the market saturation with similar nonsense and the lack of creativity frustrated my experience.

The second chapter showed in full view how hard it is to pack in a feature film all the 1000 pages of a novel that is so multi-layered in terms of ideas and space-time. The first one smartly stuck to the perspective of the kids and presented It as the manifestation of the natural fears that reside in the soul of every child. The second one had to portray what the adult versions of the heroes had taken from the confrontation of their past demons, and also to bridge their motivations and memories into the tightly connected shells of their characters, and it doesn’t do a bad job at it. It’s mostly a tale about returns; a return to childhood to revive lost memories (which in the middle they have to literally look for), a return to the roots of their characters and their fears, which the hated clown will again incarnate through an almost childish perspective (therefore the criticised CGI monsters), and a return to the old rituals that are supposed to defeat evil, but are in fact only a pretext for that simple return and to be released from its grip and the grip from the past. The film manages to capture all this without offending the fans of the book, as its spirit and the relationships between the characters are relatively well portrayed. To intertwine the past and the present, Muschietti uses imaginative smooth transitions and conversational planes regularly interspersed with digging into more or less fertile horror soil. The main weakness when compared to the novel (which is simply unattainable) is that, whereas in King’s book all the switches between the several characters doesn’t exhaust the reader, but actually increases the tension and the level of information, in the film things become repetitive and the constantly recurring CGI scares loose their power. This is also applies to the long climax, which can never hold your full attention. However, if we consider the scope of the material the screenwriter and the director attempted to cover, the result was ultimately successful. Some of the horror moments are truly good (for instance, the opening scene at the bridge) and it’s a pity that most of it is so accessible and fun – they shouldn’t have spared on realistic violence, and since the film is already R-rated, someone could have though of making Jessica Chastain take off her bra. In any case, as an adaptation of a great book, this is solid work, but I should warn you, if you didn’t like the first one much, don’t expect to love this one at all. 70%

I don’t watch Czech films these days, they don’t interest me and I don’t see in them anything original and authorial in terms of style and narration (when I happen to stumble upon them on TV). The Painted Bird is not the revolutionary and morally questionable movie the initial responses made us believe, but it’s nonetheless honest, intimate and thoughtful filmmaking of the kind other domestic productions can not match. There have been comparisons with Tarkovsky or Markéta Lazarová, but I wouldn't go that far; Marhoul is more sober and more naturalistic, and also more accessible from a narrative standpoint. The black and white composition is an understandable and correct step for such bleak material, while the taciturnity combined with the overuse of details and the sparse editing allow for a deeper immersion of the viewer in the atmosphere so they can be ready to react with empathy to all the horrors in front of them, which the camera tastefully hides most of the time, so the story will not feel gratuitously violent. The narration consists of simply intertwined episodes with the unifying motif of the complex development of the protagonist – complex only in the sense that each chapter shapes a different side of Jošek's personality and gives him experiences that help him grow up in that terrible environment without real love. Otherwise, the development is not too surprising, Marhoul relies mainly on changing of moral environments, which take second place to the objective statements of the cruelty of war, the misery associated to it and the religious fanaticism of the predominantly rural civilians. It is a pity that in the episodic structure this secondary function gradually becomes stronger than the repeated suffering of the main character. Overall, however, I must praise it, The Painted Bird looks beautiful, it doesn’t get boring despite its runtime and the repetitiveness, the performances and the casting of the repulsive village folk are perfect (even I could have had a small role), and it presents big ideas and a cruel vision of human nature with a strong author’s signature (though I couldn’t avoid laughing when I heard the Wilhelm Scream when someone fell off a horse). A case of impressive filmmaking that may not have that huge an impact on savvy viewers despite its great ambitions, but that with every shot and scene it screams that it should be taken seriously here and abroad – and that, fortunately, it doesn’t get too annoying even after two hours.

It could use a longer runtime and more detailed insight on the closing stage of the actor’s career, but otherwise this is a very inspiring and complex summary of Jack’s personality and his imprint on all those iconic film roles. Jack Nicholson is the last and the greatest star of good-old Hollywood and this likeable documentary will only confirm that.

If you like bloody carnage in the popular setting of a remote forest and all you need is a mindless showcase of stabbing tools and deaths, you will surely enjoy The Furies. But if you believe that horror creators should know how to work with the viewer, pinpoint the tension, creatively alter the shape of the scenes and escalate the events, then don’t expect much. Although I am a fan of this kind of enthusiast work and appreciate every new idea, this Australian attempt is only halfway between a loose violent ride and dark horror, where the relationships among the characters and a personal revenge are also at stake. That said, for underground horror festivals or a night screening over a beer, Furies is alright. Strong 2*.

Love at first sight. From the very beginning, I felt that by its nature and period setting this was a film made exactly for me, and – not only because of that – I smiled like a fool during half the screening and laughed out loud the rest. Tarantino’s love letter to the film industry is interested in its own characters, like Jackie Brown, and in its stylised historical reality, which you don’t have to know that deep for it to amuse you with its subversiveness and lightness. And even though in the end the reflection of the real instances is more fun than the development of the characters, the story still creates an entertaining and formally sharp picture of a time with a contagious laxness and the status of the elders, who lead an open fight with the younger generation for a place of prominence. Margot Robbie as the symbol of an easygoing and unaware star is gorgeous, DiCaprio is in his element and Pitt, with very possibly the role of a lifetime, steals every scene he’s in. An amazing soundtrack underscoring the atmosphere and an ending that not even my wettest cinephile dreams could have hoped. Three times to the cinema won’t be enough.

If the load of Toy Story’s previous episodes was smart entertainment, the load of the fourth one is emotional. Really. A wholesome sequel that seemed redundant after the flawless third instalment, but that in the end manages to brilliantly complete the arc of Woody, entertain with genre tricks (when they dropped the music of The Shining in the antique shop, I fell into cinephile ecstasy), smartly bring in new characters that develop the ideas of the previous films, and deliver a finale that took my breath away with its emotional realism. Although I grunted a little at the popular secondary characters, I think this definitely completes the Toy Story and makes it one of the most beautiful in the history of animation. And there’s no doubt I will come back to it. 90%