The Avengers

A film where characters from five separate films come together. There is a cube. It gives unlimited energy and an organisation has been testing it. Loki arrives, takes it, and takes over the minds of two men. A scattered team is assembled in response. A soldier, a billionaire, a scientist, a god and two agents. From there the first half of the film is about people who cannot stay in a room together. They are shut inside a flying base, they argue, and in the laboratory scene they say genuinely cruel things to each other. A loss brings the team together. The second half is a battle in New York. The sky opens, the city comes down, and six people work together for the first time. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but fit: the film says so in a single shot, where the camera moves among all six in the middle of the fight without a cut, and that shot became its signature. The Banner character changed again in this film. The same actor plays both the man and the creature, and the creature was produced from that actor's face for the first time. The dialogue is the film's real strength. The script gets its jokes out of character, and nobody can say anybody else's line. Most of the New York sequences were shot in Cleveland, where a street was closed and dressed as New York. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson are in the cast. Joss Whedon wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who has watched the earlier films and wants the payoff. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a standalone story; the narrative rests on five films and the villain's plan is thin.