Critical week: Look! Up in the air!

Friday night's big London screening of the mega-blockbuster Avengers Assemble (aka The Avengers) managed to work the crowd into a frenzy. Well, it's no wonder since this film features the stars of four franchises coming together to save the planet rather than working on their own. It's a big, crazy movie, put together by writer-director Joss Whedon with a mix of po-faced heroics, witty banter and astounding action. It has "massive hit" written all over it, and bodes well for further movie adventures for Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and even the Hulk, who's wonderfully reinvented in this film.

Nothing else really came close to that last week. American Pie: Reunion (aka American Reunion) managed to reassemble the franchise's entire cast, which was pretty impressive. Sadly the script just isn't up to snuff. Also screened to us were the extremely low-key British drama Late September, the pretentious but boldly inventive gay Shakespeare adaptation Private Romeo, and a trio of American B-movies: William Friedkin's stagey but hugely atmospheric Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey as a dirty cop/hitman; the full-throttle grisly road thriller Transit, starring Jim Caviezel as an ex-con family man; and, best of the lot, the subtle noir drama Fury (aka The Samaritan), starring Samuel L Jackson as a con-artist trying to go legit.

This coming week we have Will Ferrell's Spanish-language drama Casa de Mi Padre, the Matt Smith sci-fi romance Clone (aka Womb), the British thriller Piggy, the award-winning British drama Two Years at Sea, the French action thriller The Assault, the Diana Vreeland doc The Eye Has to Travel, the Muppet-performer doc Being Elmo, and the African village doc Town of Runners.