Review - Avengers: Age of Ultron

Like the return of the swallows to Capistrano or the swarming of the Monarchs from Mexico, the arrival of spring each year is announced with almost natural periodicity by the flocking of moviegoers to the new episode of Marvel Studios' comic book superhero spectacular! Studio head Kevin Feige could probably set his own watch to the volume of ticket receipts pouring in, having masterminded the most lucrative business model in the industry; An interconnected series of lean, lighthearted action films that play to the people's love of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), the mighty Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and an ever growing cast of other costumed do-gooders.

All signs would suggest that the fandom's appetite to see Earth's mightiest heroes teaming up again would be as insatiable as it was the first time they hit the big screen together in 2012's box office champ The Avengers. Writer-director Joss Whedon returns for this hotly anticipated sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and wastes no time in giving the public what it wants, kicking off the super-squad's newest adventure with that 'money shot' you've already seen a hundred times in the trailers and TV ads:

Review - Godzilla

Run for your lives! After over a decade of dormancy, one of the most literally gigantic figures in cinema history has reemerged from the depths of the development ocean to wreak havoc in movie houses the world over! That said, Godzilla is far more likely to draw people in than to send them screaming from the theatre, delivering as it does on the promise of an immediately enjoyable summer blockbuster... albeit one that, unlike the atomic beastie on the marquee, has a fairly short radioactive half-life.

Anyone who's even vaguely familiar with the films of Toho (the Japanese studio that spawned the daikaiju subgenre) should already understand why Godzilla really is the great great granddaddy of movie monsters. It's survived everything from nuclear bombs to Roland Emmerich bombs, and has persevered through decades of incarnations in its native Japan to become an unmistakable cross-cultural icon. Indeed, so distinctive is the look and sound of this 50-story killer lizard, that it's the most internationally recognizable star in the film's impressive cast, which includes the likes of Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Elizabeth Olsen, and David Strathairn.

Review - Anna Karenina

With numerous adaptations of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina already dotting the cinematic timeline, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard can at least be considered justified in wanting to stir the pot with this newest rendition of the titular adulteress' tragic fall from grace. Yet in attempting to strip the romance down to its emotional essence, their bold experiment misses the mark; a dazzling yet seemingly arbitrary exercise in stylization.

In 1870s tzarist Russia, Anna (Keira Knightley) is afforded all the luxuries and status that her marriage to Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) allows. That means lavish balls, dinners, theatre outings, the works. But when her eye catches the dashing regiment officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her hidden desires prove too tempting to ignore. We watch as she destroys herself for forbidden love, spiraling from envied socialite to reviled pariah.