What do you get if you cross a Norse god-king with an ego the size of a planet, a nervy science boffin with gigantic anger issues, a WWII super-soldier with a very silly costume and a genius billionaire playboy with flying power-armour? Arguments, that’s what.

With great power comes great banter in writer/director Joss Whedon’s blockbuster multiplier, which isn’t the best superhero movie ever – but might well be the funniest.

Avengers Assemble is a power-play that’s unprecedented in Hollywood history: launching four different $100m franchises to construct one super-mega-franchise. And it has to be said, handing it to a 47-year-old fanboy whose single previous feature film (Serenity) couldn’t even scrape back its budget at the worldwide box-office was a massive dice-roll.

Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) on the big screen together was always going to be a huge kick. But could any screen be big enough for all them? Would Avengers Assemble look like four bodybuilders in an elevator? The suit, the smash, the hammer, the shield… Like X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man 2, there was a real danger of heroverload.

Sure enough, it takes Whedon some time to shuffle the deck before dealing out a functional plotline, as SHIELD chief Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) recruits the superheroes to save Earth after Thor’s power-mad brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) returns to enslave mankind with an all-powerful cosmic cube.

“What does he want me to do, swallow it?” asks Bruce Banner. And from there, the zingers keep coming. With X-Men and X2, Bryan Singer showed how you could disguise a compelling ensemble drama as a superhero actioner. Dialogue and dynamics are exactly Whedon’s special powers – as well as creating cult TV phenomenon Buffy, he worked on the scripts for X-Men and Toy Story – and his screenplay pulls together a group of mega-powered freaks and geeks who have pretty much zero interest in each other.

How? By locking big egos in tight spaces and letting the funnies fly. Lifting the movie’s pace every time he steps on screen in the first half, Tony Stark catalyses Avengers with gatling-gun wit. He drubs the Cap’s meagre brain like a speed-ball and hammers Thor, whether it’s his cape (“Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?”), his kingly lingo (“Shakespeare In The Park?”) or the fact he hasn’t had a haircut since his own movie came out (“No hard feelings, Point Break”).

But affectionately, Whedon plays to the characters’ weaknesses as well as their strengths as his comic-book heroes bounce off each other. And we do mean that literally. Mere mortals (Jeremy Renner’s laser-sighted archer Hawkeye, Scarlett Johansson’s gymnastic spy Black Widow) don’t get lost in the mix and cineastes will be delighted to discover that not one but two arthouse favourites pop up to steal Stan Lee’s cameo thunder.

Despite Scar-Jo’s seam-straining catsuit and SHIELD eye-candy Maria Hill (How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders, a Wonder Woman contender), there’s no sex factor in this superhero sausage-fest. Instead, the most interesting frisson sparks between fellow brainiacs Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. Third time’s a charm: Mark Ruffalo’s hand-rubbing performance as Banner looks definitive and Whedon, in just a few short scenes, captures a far more dangerous relationship between Banner and “the other guy” than we’ve seen in two previous big-screen Hulks.

One of the past problems was that Mr Hyde never really looked like Dr Jekyll. But with Ruffalo’s own face used as scaffolding for the CG monster’s features, a much more humanised Hulk emerges as the movie’s unlikely hero. Once the green giant bursts out of Banner’s shirt, he grabs hold of the movie and yanks it out of Downey Jr’s hands. The best moments and the biggest laughs belong to Hulk’s smash-happy personality – and only one of them is blown by the trailer.

Unlike Banner, bigness doesn’t come naturally for Whedon. So it’s no surprise that much of Avengers Assemble involves people talking in rooms. He hired Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (We Need To Talk About Kevin, Atonement, High Fidelity) for that, but he’s also surrounded himself with a crew of slam-bang assistant directors who’ve worked on everything from The Bourne Ultimatum to The Fast And The Furious to Tarantino’s upcoming Django Unchained.

Having locked down the characters in Avengers’ first half, Whedon’s tech-team help him put his money (more than $200m of it) where his mouth is and let rip with a pair of exciting, elastic acti0n sequences that soak up the second half. After a cramped airship siege high in the clouds, the movie surges towards a wide-0pen blitzkrieg finale of city-smashing chaos that stretches for Transformers levels of mass destruction. As Loki’s army pours in from another dimension, one showboating unbroken action shot swoops through the battle to track each of the Avengers representing against giant flying robo-fish and alien charioteers.

Truth be told, there’s never quite enough real drama or danger for our effectively invincible superheroes. But this 135-minute romp between gods, monsters, men and supermen packs so much crowd-pleasing colour and humour that it’s impossible not to walk out grinning. Just don’t walk out too soon. As if we need to tell you, a few tantalising post-credits seconds reveal a Titanic super-villain who’s ready for the sequel(s)…

VERDICT: ★★★★
Fun to the power of four, Joss Whedon’s Avengers is equal to the sum of its parts – and for once, that’s no faint praise. Suit up.

After Jennifer Lawrence’s first audition, talent agents told her mother it was “the best cold-read by a 14 year old they had ever heard”. Six years later, she was scorching down the red carpet at the Academy Awards in a Calvin Klein dress looking hotter than the sun. Oscar-nominated in indie drama Winter’s Bone, blockbuster babe in X-Men: First Class and now starring in her own killer franchise The Hunger Games… Lawrence is raising the temperature in Hollywood.

The Hunger Games sounds like the anti-Twilight…

Thank you! That’s the first time I’ve heard that! Normally it’s being compared to Twilight, which is totally understandable given the size and they’re both books turned into movies. But yeah… definitely not Twilight.

Do you worry about whether you can keep your feet on the ground given all the attention you’ll get?

Of course, nobody ever goes into this going, “Yeah, I bet I’m going to become a drug addict and go off the deep end.” But this is just a job. It’s a weird job, but it’s a job. I don’t think me, Jennifer, is any different from you.

So you’re not worried about The Hunger Games having a Twilight-style effect on you?

If I make this huge franchise about myself, then that’s a lot of pressure. And I also don’t read things. I think Googling yourself is the worst idea ever.

So you’ve never done that?

I have, that’s how I know! I went onto the comments of my IMDb page. Never do that!

What did it say? Bad stuff?

I can’t even remember, it was just, you know, being in high school: “She’s not that pretty!” I was like, “Oh my god!” And then – this was a few years ago – I called my mom, crying, “These people say that I have a round face!” She said, “Don’t read that!” It’s just terrible.

Do you think reality shows could ever go as far as The Hunger Games?

When you live in a world in which history repeats itself… Think about the ancient gladiators – humans have watched other humans die as entertainment. Given, it was a thousand years ago, but I do think it could happen.

How real did it feel real on set?

If I look exhausted in the movie, that’s definitely real! Running, free running, track, hand-to-hand combat, stunt training and archery. It was hard as hell but really fun.

Could you handle yourself in a real fight now?

I think if somebody stood really still I could probably!

Are there any gross-out scenes?

There’s actually a squirrel. I’m eating a squirrel.

Wait, you did that in Winter’s Bone. Is this your thing?

Yeah, I texted my friend that and she wrote back, “Find a new Oscar trick.” I’m skinning another squirrel!

Was it surreal to be at the Oscars for Winter’s Bone?

Well, yeah! I mean, we made that movie… I hoped that it would even get released, that it would see daylight, and to think that I was at the Oscars and people had seen the movie … it was so bizarre! It was the most bizarre experience of my whole life.

That was an amazing dress…

Thank you! I’m so shocked that I get compliments on it, because the Oscars are the last of the awards season and I was so sick of corsets and trains that I had given up. That’s what that dress was: I was going, “I’m done.” I thought, “They’re going to say bad things about me but I don’t care, I can’t be uncomfortable any more.” And then everybody was like, “Love the dress!”

Who are your acting idols?

I love Gary Oldman. It’s because I never realise it’s him. I never see him in a movie and think, “Oh, it’s Gary Oldman.” I’m always, “Who is that?” I think that’s just so impressive. Tilda Swinton is one of my favourite actresses. I also love Bill Murray and John Cleese.

Have you ever been starstruck?

I didn’t meet them, but I saw Brad and Angelina at the Golden Globes and they stopped my heart. I’ve just worked with Robert De Niro and that was probably the most starstruck I’ve ever been.

That was on a David O Russell film’s The Silver Linings Playbook – what was it like meeting De Niro?

I couldn’t even process it. I had two choices. It was either, “Taxi Driver, OMG!” and get on my knees and cry, or I go in totally the opposite direction. So I completely ignored him! I was so rude! I was too shocked…

What do you do to relax outside of work? Any other ambitions?

No ambitions. Nothing. When I’m not working I’m not working. My friend told me I have the soul of Homer Simpson – I can stay on the couch for 15 hours straight.

Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?

I’m unbelievably clumsy. It seems as if I’m putting it on. I spill everything, I fall down all the time, it’s so annoying. It’s like endearing and cute for, like, five minutes.

Publication: i-D

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (voted one of the worst movies ever). Mission To Mars (Rolling Stone: “DePalma has never made a dull movie. Until now.”). Red Planet (Variety: “Mission To Mars had style to burn compared to Red Planet”). Ghosts Of Mars (killed John Carpenter’s career for nine years). Doom (one of Time magazine’s 10 Worst Ever Videogame Adaps). Mars Attacks! (Budget: $100m. US box-office: $38m). Mars Needs Moms (the biggest box-office bomb of all time).

If history has taught us one lesson, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie about Mars, it had better star Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lady with three boobies. Otherwise? Forget it. So maybe the smartest thing WALL-E director Andrew Stanton has ever done was chopping the words “Of Mars” off the title of his first live-action movie.

Of course, that does leave him with a movie that sounds more like a thoughtful drama about a medical intern from ER than a $250m 3D blockbuster adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sci-fi adventure novel A Princess Of Mars.

Exactly 100 years ago, the same year he created Tarzan, Burroughs’ began publishing an 11-volume saga that’s influenced pretty much every major sci-fi storyteller since. Without John Carter (cough, of Mars), we wouldn’t have Star Wars, Star Trek or Avatar. Long before Luke came dangerously close to sleeping with his sister, before Kirk began indiscriminately humping ladies of unusual skin colour and before Jake made blue moves with Neytiri, there was an ex-Cavalry soldier called John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) who boldly went where no man had gone before to join a rebellion and fall in love a Martian warrior-princess called Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins).

Or should that be Deja vu? The big problem for Andrew Stanton’s big-screen blockbuster adaption is that, a century later, we do have Star Wars, Star Trek and Avatar. Sadly, John Carter has come a little too late to his own party and all the other boys and girls have eaten his cake and popped his balloons.

Even the witty intro scenes in the Old West – as raggedy gold-hunter Carter busts out of military jail only to run into Native Americans – feel unavoidably like Cowboys & Aliens. Maybe it’s no accident that a pre-Iron Man Jon Favreau was initially signed to direct John Carter (he appears to have stolen at least one gag from the script). Before long, though, the cowboy is the alien, with Carter mysteriously transported to another desert world far, far away.

No sooner has he escaped heavily armed natives on the American frontier, Carter’s captured by more (literally) heavily armed natives at the final frontier. “What the hell are you?” rasps the green-skinned Thark warrior who discovers him, amusingly echoing the famous exchange between another alien hunter and a bare-chested human super-soldier.

These 10ft-tall, four-armed, tusked, Nomadic barbarians are the real triumph of Stanton’s movie, brought to life with convincing special-effects and a fully believable culture where weakness – shockingly, even from unhatched infants – isn’t tolerated. Designed and depicted in superb detail, they’re a far more fascinating race than the Na’vi and are given palpable spirit by voice-actors Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church and Samantha Morton. Carter’s adorable super-speedy Thark puppy also shows George Lucas exactly how you do a cute comedy sidekick.

In fact, Stanton and co-writer Michael Chabon (author of Wonder Boys and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay) work hard to show us the richness of Burroughs’ parched Barsoomian planet. The strain shows, too. Things get more complex and less interesting outside the Thark’s primitive tribal realm. An enigmatic race of powerful mystics (led by the effortlessly Machiavellian Mark Strong) appear to be puppeteering Mars’ red-skinned imperial civilisation, whose courageous Princess is being forced to marry the superweapon-wielding Prince Than (Dominic West).

By now, Carter has discovered that he’s capable of Super Mario-style anti-gravity leaps (and, luckily, soft landings too) and strength greater than his size. JC, saviour of Mars, is a superman who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. But outside a couple of promising battles – Carter bounces into action to single-handedly bring down Prince Than’s attack ships and join forces with the sword-swinging Dejah – Stanton’s movie comes up way too light on action.

Nothing here compares to the sustained choreography and epic carnage of Avatar and Lord Of The Rings. And again, Lucas already borrowed some of the best bits, like the gladiatorial combat against fearsome beasts (Attack Of The Clones) and the giddy speeder-bike chase (Return Of The Jedi).

Kitsch proves a handsome, forceful hero. Collins is refreshingly dynamic heroine. The former Wolverine co-stars have strong chemistry and support from a vivid cast. But adrenaline and emotion rarely throb strongly enough to propel the story, making it tough to get too excited about a John Carter franchise despite the vast world and mythology to explore.

To be fair, Stanton does wittily acknowledge he’s just made a movie about an human soldier whose body remains back on Earth while he goes Native on an alien planet – Carter gets blue blood-bath at one point. And we’ll salute any filmmaker who manages to squeeze a decapitation into a Disney movie.

VERDICT: ★★★
Get your ass to Mars? A handsome new sci-fi adventure that feels a little too familiar. Enjoyable enough while it lasts, John Carter is big on ambition and disappointingly short on action.

Publication: Total Film

Someone doesn’t want you to see this film – it was stolen, not once but twice, before its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. That adds further dark spice to this elusive, fascinating glimpse at modern Russia through the life of imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Splicing investigative interviews with stylish animated sequences, filmmaker Cyril Tuschi’s involving documentary tries to discover how Khodorkovsky went from being the world’s richest man under 40 to a seemingly indefinite prisoner in Siberia. Edged with cynicism and wit, Tuschi’s film can’t hide its admiration – but real answers lurk tantalisingly out of reach.

RATING: ★★★★

Publication: Total Film

Taking cocaine and sleeping with your patients? Psychoanalysis sure ain’t what it used to be. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method reveals the fascinating battle of wills between the two great minds – Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung – that invented modern head-shrinking. It’s a movie about ego, intellect and ambition. It’s a movie about spanking Keira Knightley. It’s also Cronenberg’s third film in a row with Viggo Mortensen, concreting one of modern cinema’s most fearless, fascinating partnerships. The two men sit down together on the couch. Let today’s therapy begin.

We’ve got a spluttery cough, so apologies in advance…
David Cronenberg: Oh, okay. Did I already shake hands with you? Sorry, I’m gonna wash my hands now. Keep talking. I’m going to use my gel. [Starts rubbing on hand sanitiser]
Viggo Mortensen: Can I try too? I can’t afford to get sick. [They both sit there vigorously lubricating their hands] If we put on rubber gloves too, don’t be alarmed.
DC: It’s a little examination. We like to make sure who we’re talking to.
VM: Yeah, inside and out.

So Viggo, why weren’t you initially down to play Freud in his film?
DC: Well, I had a better actor.
VM: He had asked me to do it and I wasn’t available at the time. He found someone else and that person…
DC: Waltzed. Christoph Waltz waltzed.
VM: …and David asked me again.

Were you worried about playing such a complex character?
VM: If someone else had asked me to play this role, I would have hesitated. But sometimes it’s good to be put in a position you’re not used to, where you forced to try something.
DC: The script is the key. There were hundreds of people involved in their lives over 50 years and [Oscar-winning screenwriter] Christopher Hampton found a way to compress all that into six years, 99 minutes, five characters. Freud was alive on the page.

And the beard and cigar helped?
DC: He had a fake nose and contact lenses, too. But the nose was so subtle that you didn’t notice.
VM: We had some initial fear about using brown lenses, that we’d lose expressiveness, but the eyes worked really well. We just went by photographs, mostly, and descriptions of a particular kind of gaze or his wit.
DC:  As I look at his nose, it’s looking much more Freudian that it used to.
VM: It’s getting bigger, isn’t it?
DC: Yeah, it is.
VM: They say that as you get older…
DC: Your nose keeps growing.
VM: It does.
DC: And the ears as well.
VM: Ears, too? Really. Hmm.

Apparently. So when we get old, we all look…
VM: Strange.
DC: Big nose and floppy ears. Well, we only should live so long, that’s the thing.

Was the beard all your own work?
VM: Yes. Well, it wasn’t much work.
DC: Less work actually, you don’t shave.
VM: Someone asked me that at a press conference once. There were 40 journalists sitting there, from all over the world, and probably only seven of them got to ask a question. There was a woman from Japan who asked, ‘Was that your real beard?’ I almost said, ‘Are you kidding? You’ve flown around the world to ask that?’ But then I thought, ‘Well, I’d better give her a good answer.’ So I told her there was a beard farm, north of Sante Fe New Mexico, where they would grow this stubble. And she wrote it down.
DC: And you know what? They’re probably doing that in Japan right now!

Were you worried that film about Freud and Jung might be a boring? Too much talking?
DC: No. For me, it wasn’t a struggle. I didn’t even think that. To me, cinema is a face talking. And the play was called The Talking Cure. There’s gonna be talking! It’s just the nature of the game. Just like in a movie called A History Of Violence, there’s going to be violence.

And you do have scenes of Keira Knightley getting spanking…
DC: Not a lot of spanking… Only two shots. But in your mind…
VM: It’s like in History Of Violence, people thought there were 50 fights and there was only…
DC: Like three or something. There are two shots, literally, of spanking. But the impact of the spanking – not to make joke of it! – is an innate part of what the movie’s about. Speaking things that were unspeakable at the time.

You’ve worked together three times now. What it is you like about each other?
VM: David pays attention to the little reactions you have: you shift your eyes, a certain tone of voice, body language, So I feel like I can do a lot. Or very little. If it works, he’s going to see it. A lot of directors don’t even see it.
DC: I spend weeks with the actor in the editing room, looking at every nuance. Even the rhythm of their breathing as they speak. It can really reshape a performance. You hear people say, ‘My performance was destroyed in the editing room.’ That can actually happen.

Has that happened to you?
VM: Has that happened? Yeah. I’ve had extreme things happen, like a director decided he didn’t like me saying what he shot and taking words I’d said in other scenes and cobbling an entirely new sentence together without my permission. I was stunned when I saw it. That’s hard to take.

Have either of you ever been psychoanalysed?
DC: I know a fair number of psychoanalysts, but I’ve never been in analysis. Literally, I say, I have no problems. But I know people who’ve Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis and have actually said, ‘It saved my life.’ So you can’t argue with it.
VM: About 20 years ago, I went for a couple of months. At the time, I felt there was no one I could talk to about certain things with. I needed someone emotional disengaged who would just listen. I think the idea of a confession without judgement is a great idea.

What about dreams?
DC: Oh yeah, I have dreams and I just laugh at them. To me, my dreams are so obvious!

Could you share one?
DC: No, of course not!
VM: Haha!
DC: Just like Freud says in the movie, I can’t risk my authority… Really, I just tell my wife.
VM: Every so often, a dream is funny enough or weird enough that I might write it down, just so I can remember it. But I don’t analyse them.

Freud and Jung are surprisingly funny guys in the film. Is that true?
VM: Maybe Freud had a better sense of humour but I don’t think Jung was without one.
DC: You can see interviews with Jung on YouTube, because he lived till 1961. And you can see, he’s very charming and very charismatic and sweet – and funny too.
VM: The kind of humour Freud loved was things like, ‘Everybody complains about the terrible weather. And yet no one does anything about it.’ Things like that. He would also say, without a smile, ‘Any time spent with cats is time well spent.’

But you’re a fan of horses, we hear. Is it true that you took some horses from Lord Of The Rings?
DC: But he’s a horse thief, that’s why he did that. He basically had sex with all the horses in the movie. That was his way of dealing with it.
VM: It wasn’t great with every single one. But I did my best.

Thanks gentleman. Should we shake hands?
DC: No.
VM: Haha! [Starts coughing] Uh-oh…

Publication: ShortList

He has no friends, no past and no name. “I drive,” he says. He does. Opening with its coolest set-piece – an intense, tightly constructed stop/start getaway – Drive immediately shows us how.

Having spun the story of Brit criminal Charles Bronson into a 21st-century Clockwork Orange, hotshot Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn joins forces with Ryan Gosling to take a classic American genre-engine– a girl, a hero, a dark lord, cars, guns, dirty money – and give it a gleaming new Euro-cool chassis. Crazy to think this was meant to be a Neil Marshall blockbuster vehicle for Hugh Jackman.

Just as Refn streamlines his movie for pure vibe, Gosling stylises his own performance right to the brink of absurdity – and makes it mesmerising instead. He’s a Hollywood stunt racer who moonlights as a getaway driver (or is it the other way round?), wearing a strange half-smile and a scorpion-embossed satin jacket. He’s gentle, beautiful, almost wordless in a dreamy first-half love story with sweet mom Carey Mulligan, who’s lovely as the innocent pixie-princess in a role that’s hardly there. He gazes at her, we gaze at him. Mulligan summarised shooting Drive as “staring longingly at Ryan Gosling for hours each day.” We get it. He doesn’t even need to whip his shirt off to make us swoon this time.

But Gosling’s lonely mystery-man says so little, you almost start wondering if he’s right in the head. Turns out, he’s not. Not at all. As Mulligan’s jailbird husband (Sucker Punch’s talented Oscar Isaac) brings ruthless gangsters crashing into their world, Gosling’s soft-eyed chivalry is suddenly revealed as unblinking psychosis.

Underneath those handsome looks, he’s a dangerously unstable cut’n'shut of Travis Bickle (socially weird, prowling the streets at night alone, burning fuse to power-keg violence) and idiot-savant Raymond ‘Rain Man’ Babbitt (he’s an excellent driver). Gosling’s nameless “Driver” is also the most modern descendant of Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir loner Le Samourai. Seems odd that the lean screenplay (adapted from James Sallis’ 2005 pulp novel) was written by a writer best-known for his Oscar-nominated work on The Wings Of The Dove. Odd, until you discover Hossein Amini’s next script is Keanu Reeves’ feudal Japanese adventure 47 Ronin.

Sure enough, Drive shifts like a Samurai movie as Refn constantly feathers the accelerator pedal for maximum tension. Clocked to the adrenaline pulse of a Cliff Martinez’s excellent techno-pop score – College’s ‘Real Hero’ already feels iconic – the hypnotic rhythm is detonated by sudden, shocking eruptions of violence.

If the romance is chaste, the action sure isn’t. When Refn slams his foot down for the first-time, a breakneck road battle jack-knifes into a slo-mo motel shootout that leaves your jaw hanging. That first smack of a leather driving-glove on a woman’s face is a stinger. Once someone’s head explodes at the end of a shotgun, it’s open season. Gosling impales his first victim with a shower rail, goes for some DIY dentistry with a hammer, then stomps clean through a skull – in the same breath as a dreamy slo-mo smooch with Mulligan.

It’s right at this point you start wondering if the entire movie is really taking place inside Driver’s unhinged mind. “I used to make movies in the ’80s,” says comedian Albert Brooks, amping up the menace as a sinister crime-lord. “Action films, sexy stuff—one critic called them European.” Nods to Michael Mann, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and Ryan O’Neal are all there. But we can go even further back.

In the 1968, English director John Boorman’s made his American debut with art-noir masterpiece Point Blank about a reluctant heist gone wrong. It starred Hollywood hero Lee Marvin as a man named ‘Walker’, who barely spoke and glowered with the promise of brutality to transform a seemingly simple story into an existential quest for meaning.

For all the parallels, that film had Marvin’s emotional sad-core to anchor its cerebral stylistics. We can’t say the same about Gosling’s unknowable charismaniac. Truth be told, Drive doesn’t have anywhere to go with him. In the second half, it has no more set-pieces for us, no psychology for Gosling and pretty much forgets about Mulligan completely in this male world of machismo and violence.

Refn has suggested that his American debut is both a fairytale and – brilliant, this – an ultraviolent remake of Sixteen Candles. But what’s really under the hood? There are no emotions here, just moods. Stripped down for pure style, Drive is content to cruise on a retro-mythic mojo that feels different to anything else you’ve seen this year.

That’s not enough for greatness – the coolest B-movie of 2011 fades on second viewing.  But playing a man with no name, no friends and no past just made Ryan Gosling the hottest name in Hollywood with a lot of fans and a big future. Cross your fingers and maybe he can persuade Refn to do the next Fast And Furious.

RATING: ★★★★

For once, no one gets whacked, stabbed in the neck with a pen or beaten to a bloody pulp. For once, it isn’t that kind of ‘Family’ movie. In fact, the film most unlike anything Martin Scorsese has ever made is really the most personal of his career.

Swooping from the sky through tumbling snowflakes, volcanoes of steam and crowds of travellers, Hugo’s exuberant opening shot arrives at a pair of peering wide eyes. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas) is a 13-year-old orphan (aren’t they all?) who lives behind the giant clock in a Paris train station in 1931.

We spend almost half the film scampering after Hugo – as Scorsese’s camera whooshes joyfully through a labyrinth of ladders, shafts, cranks and cogs – without ever seeming to get very far. He’s chased by the orphan-hunting station guard (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s trying to fix a broken automaton left by his father, he’s bullied by a grumpy toy-shop-owner named Papa George (Ben Kingsley).

But, after about an hour of this busy meandering, Hugo finally gets where it’s going. And what’s revealed is something rather wonderful: an enchanting, funny, heartfelt love-letter to immortal French film pioneer Georges Méliès – and to cinema itself. We see how Méliès took movies to the moon and back in 1902, how silent cinema’s filmmakers were magicians who can still make us smile and gasp, and how precious things are lost between the grinding gears of technology and time.

There’s something truly perfect and poignant about using cinema’s breakthrough 3D technology to reach back into its past – and Scorsese revels in it. He shows us how the Lumière brothers’ famous Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat terrified audiences in 1895 by sending a runaway locomotive thundering through the screen in 2011. From Edwin S Porter to Harold Lloyd, from Cabiria to Fantômas, Scorsese (quite literally at one point) riffles through the history book of cinema. He’s Doc Brown, time-travelling, taking us with him.

But for a film that hangs off clockwork imagery, Hugo is way too mechanical for most of its over-cogged 124 minutes. A seat-squirming runtime, duff romantic subplots and repetitive chase scenes mean it’s never the marvellous children’s adventure craved by Hugo’s bookworm friend (Chloe Grace Moretz). Almost fittingly, Hugo’s wordless parts work best. Kingsley’s expertly balanced turn is full of buried pain and pride, much subtler than Cohen’s accent and Butterfield’s slightly tense performance, which falls short of the Cinema Paradiso wonder that Scorsese is shooting for.

But it’s easy to see why Scorsese has overindulged here. Despite being set in a storybook Paris, Hugo’s story is secretly Marty’s story: growing up watching the world through his window frame, falling in love with movies, restoring the reputation of his hero Michael Powell and becoming the patron saint of lost cinema. Moving images, indeed – but Hugo never fully manages to make them resonate.

RATING: ★★★

Based on Brian ‘cousin of David’ Selznick’s award-winning children’s novel, Martin Scorsese’s 3D debut is a technical marvel whose heart is tediously scaffolded by too many (non)working parts. But for anyone who loves cinema – who really loves cinema – it shouldn’t be missed.

She’s married to a martial-artist, she’s friends with the 300 stuntmen and she busted out in Prison Break. Last seen killing zombies in TV series The Walking Dead, actress Sarah Wayne Callies reveals the secret to a great marriage, how to train all day and the smell the beats stress.

1. Canada’s cure

“Poutine is a great French-Canadian hangover cure. It’s fries with beef gravy and cheese curds. It’s just salt and fat, so it replenishes your body and makes you feel better. You should start off each morning-after with poutine. I did when I was at university…”

2. Bee a healthier man

“We live right next to a beekeeper, so I take a lot of propolis. It’s what the bees give the queen of the hive to keep her healthy and it’s a really natural way to build your immune system. Take a couple of drops in water every few hours to feel better.”

3. Use pilates power

“Never do the same exercise more than twice in a week – and you don’t have to just work out twice in a week – because boredom is death when it comes to exercise. The repetition of just lifting weights can get quite dull, so mix it up with pilates. It’s great for your core and there’s so much going on physically that your mind doesn’t wander.”

4. Get a Spartan body in 30 minutes

“Do what the 300 stunt guys did to get into shape: do a set of four different exercises as many times as you can in 30 minutes. For example, your set could be: squat jumps, run a half mile, jump rope for 30 seconds, do 15 push-ups. Do a different set every day – it’s very high cardio and your body never gets used to it so you get stronger, faster.”

5. Motivation from Madonna

“I remember reading an interview with Madonna when I was a teenager. They said, ‘How do you keep yourself going to the gym?’ And she said, ‘I think about myself being fat.’ A great motivator is thinking about the alternative to being in shape – how it stops you doing the things you want to do.”

6. Have a hot breakfast

“Start your day with a lot of protein. I eat two eggs poached and drowned in hot sauce. It’s great for your metabolism – and I don’t like the taste of eggs! Eat whatever on earth I want to until lunch, because you burn it off quickly and that’s when you need the energy the most.”

7. The sweet smell of de-stress

“Lavender penetrates your brain and chemically calms us down. So find a few minutes each day, take some deep breaths and swing a little lavender by your nose. Buy a little Essential Oils jar – I’ve got one in my purse all the time.”

8. Know when it’s knot-tying time

“It’s the right time to get married when you’re not waiting for them to change to make you happy. At a certain point, you look at them and say, ‘If none of this changes, if these are her flaws and these are my flaws forever, is that okay?’ If you are, great. We’re never going to marry perfect people because we’re never going to be perfect people.”

9. Make your marriage immortal

“The secret to a marriage that lasts? Every Saturday night, come hell or high water, rain or shine, go out. Just the two of you. Don’t wait until you need to. Fight for that time, to not be talking over the kids and trying to make it over the chaos and the clutter. Go out and make somebody else do the cooking and washing up. Going for dinner is cheaper than therapy.”

10. Save your skin every morning

“One of the biggest causes of ageing is sun damage, so the real secret to great skin is adding sunscreen to your daily routine. Every day, I moisturise, let that soak in while I’m getting dressed, and then the last thing I do is put sunscreen on my face.”

11. Get more power every hour

“Once an hour, every hour, do a set of 20 push-ups. A good push-up on your fists and on your toes works so many muscle groups in your body. A friend of mine is a champion kickboxer. He said this got him in better shape faster than when he was training for fights. And you’ve always got time to train.”

12. Fear is your friend

“Do something that scares you every day. Once you do it, you’re not scared of it anymore, so that’s one less thing on the list of things that scare you. The more fearlessly you live your live, the freely you live your life.”

Publication: Men’s Health.

1. Jamie Lee Curtis

Arise, your Majesty. Graced with a killer combo of legs and lungs, Curtis ran screaming through the genre. Debuting in Halloween, she survived six slashers in five years (including The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train). Tender yet tough, Curtis redefined horror heroines forever. Her mother must have been proud…

2. Janet Leigh

Like mother, like daughter. Janet Leigh gave birth to a) Jamie Lee Curtis and b) the greatest scream in cinema history. Between screeching violins and slashing edits, her scheming bitch was sliced to naked ribbons in the shower in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Legend has it, she only took baths after that.

3. Fay Wray

Grabbing a blonde wig and a $10,000 paycheque, 5ft 3ins Fay Wray went iconic versus 50ft King Kong. She’d warmed up her vocals in ‘30s Technicolor horrors like Doctor X and The Vampire Bat, but becoming the beauty that killed the beast would seal her rep as cinema’s very first “Queen of Scream”.

4. Neve Campbell

Sharp as a knife. Campbell became postmodern horror’s belle du jour in the hipster Scream trilogy, surviving by wising up to the rules of the genre. While cleavage-heaving bimbos were put to the sword, she played horror at its own game – and won. She even grabbed an extra slice of The Ghostface Killer in Scream 4.

5. Debbie Rochon

Don’t recognise her? Hardcore horror fans worship her. Once voted “Scream Queen Of The Decade”, Rochon is the cult star of more than 100 B-movie fear-flicks, including Troma classics Tromeo And Juliet and Terror Firmer. Even a prop machete that nearly severed her right hand couldn’t stop her.

6. Asia Argento

Italian scaremonger Dario Argento used to read his daughter horror scripts as bedtime stories. No wonder little Asia grew into a tough-grrrl for the Suicide Girls generation: raven-haired, tattooed, naked. Dad put her through the ringer in Trauma and The Stendahl Syndrome before she kicked zombie ass in George A Romero’s Land Of The Dead. More than just sweet meat on the slab.

7. Sarah Michelle Gellar

Surviving her role in Scream 2, Gellar became the face of I Know What You Did Last Summer and J-horror remakes The Grudge and The Grudge 2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She also played Daphne in the Scooby Doo movies. Horrors, in both senses of the word.

8. Naomi Watts

Surprised? Think again. With The Ring, King Kong and Funny Games, Watts has completed the unholy trilogy of horror opponents: ghost, monster and psycho. She’s not done yet. Apparently, Watts is first in the queue to star as the new Tippi Hepdren in a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

9. Danielle Harris

Not even Jamie Lee Curtis as appear in as Halloweens as Harris, who has also starring in everything from Urban Legend to Cheerleaders Must Die!. As if that wasn’t enough, she even had a real-life stalker experience, when an obsessed fan rocked up at her house armed with a teddy bear and a shotgun.

10. Adrienne Barbeau

Cheekily nicknamed “Adrienne Barboobs”, the former Broadway star turned lung-busting lovely thanks to a role in husband John Carpenter’s The Fog. She went on to channel (literally) naked fear in in Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing and George Romero/Stephen King’s Creepshow. Recognise her sultry voice? She’s Catwoman in Batman: The Animated Series.

Published: MSN HIM

Captain America: First Avenger ends with the saddest last line in blockbuster history. Chris Evans delivers it beautifully: unexpected, gentle, agonisingly poignant. But the movie doesn’t seem to notice. It triumphantly roll the credits, you walk out of the cinema wondering why your heart just decompressed inside your chest, and off we zoom to next year’s superhero-a-thon The Avengers.

Is that what this was all about? Having apprenticed in Fantastic Four, Push and Scott Pilgrim, 30-year-old Evans has waited a long time for his first franchise starring role. But in Captain American, he finds himself playing Marvel’s dullest superhero in a movie that might be a two-hour prologue for another movie.

First seen socking Hitler in the mouth on the cover of a comic-book in 1941, skinny-runt turned WWII super-soldier Steve Rogers was more of a 2D piece of US propaganda than complex characters like pre-Pearl-Harbor crusaders Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent. But right from his opening scene, Evans underplays him with quiet, surprising shades of pathos and personality.

Thanks to an amazing digital effect, Evans transforms with utter believability into a short, scrawny New York kid whose weakling health means he’ll never pass an army medical. It’s Evans performance, though, that makes us believe Rogers’ feeble body packs a mighty heart. He’s the kind of humble, earnest ordinary hero you just never see in this kind of movie – good but not goody-goody, masculine but not macho – and he’s massively likeable.

Ironically, the movie starts losing its powers when Steve gains his. Injected with a top-secret military serum that gives him huge strength, agility and healing speed, he emerges – muscular, glistening, amusingly Aryan – as Captain America. And it rapidly becomes clear that beefing-up the Cap means losing all the meat on his character. This all-American action-figure doesn’t have the powers (strength, speed, healing, a magic shield), the weaknesses (er, he can’t get drunk) or the inner pain (his problems just vanished) of the greatest supermen.

Which is partly why screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Chronicles Of Narnia) aren’t sure what to do with him next. Suffering a similar dipping arc, director Joe Johnson once looked like an exciting junior Spielberg with the inventive charm of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and the retro-pop of The Rocketeer. Twenty years later, he’s the journeyman who directed Jurassic Park III and The Wolfman with the same vanilla style on show here.

Embracing the pulpy vibe, Johnson keeps things old-fashioned and square – there’s no Tool on the soundtrack, like in the trailer – although dusty sepia-toned colours and deco-modern production design invokes just the right kind of nostalgia. And, in a lovely nod to Cap’s origins as a ‘40s propaganda weapon, the smartest sequence sees Steve touring America in a silly costume with a troupe of chorus girls and appearing in a line of comic-books.

Those nice early touches – Rogers busting into a superhuman sprint for the first time, misjudging a corner and crashing through a shop window – soon give way to a series of repetitive action montages in which Cap (joined by an irrelevant multi-ethnic band of soldiers) never really seems in danger from retro-techno Nazis with glowing laser-guns.

Luckily, Evans has serious reinforcements in the shape of a near-perfect support cast. Stanley Tucci can scientifically do no wrong on screen (even viz ze Jur-man ak-zent, ja?). Tommy Lee Jones probably brushes his teeth like a gruff military man. Brit new-girl Hayley Atwell feels fresh in a love-interest role that doesn’t. Dominic Cooper has fun as Howard ‘father of Tony’ Stark, as Marvel desperately synergises. Toby Jones is another class act.

But it’s Hugo Weaving who pulls the masterstroke, channelling his megalomaniac Nazi freak The Red Skull through – of all things – a magnificent Werner Herzog accent! Well played, sir. Despite a ludicrous backstory (some sort of all-powerful magical – what?), Weaving’s fiery menace gives Captain America a proper villain.

Juicy hero/villain contrasts and parallel-histories are ignored, though, and it isn’t until that tragic dying second of the movie that Captain America gets interesting. What happens when a superhero whose real power is his heart has it broken? But then it’s over and Evan’s Cap is briskly shuffled into the pack with Marvel’s box-office top trumps Thor, Iron Man and The Hulk. Oh well. See you next year…

RATING: ★★★

Publication: MSN Movies.