Mavis Gary is a writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her happily married high school sweetheart. When returning home proves more difficult than she thought, Mavis forms an unusual bond with a former classmate who hasn’t quite gotten over high school, either. (Paramount Pictures)

It’s been coming a long time…

Flash back to 2008, when “Incredible Hulk” rebooted the big green monster after Ang Lee’s misfire, and “Iron Man” breathed new life and energy into the superhero movie after “Spiderman 3″ and “X-Men 3″ had sucked all life out of the genre. (Another big movie that summer: “The Dark Knight.”  It really was a great year for superheroes.)  Then there was another “Iron Man,” not as good as the first one, then “Thor” last spring and “Captain America” last summer.

Now, they all come together in what’s called in the comic books a “team-up.”  Even in the comic books “The Avengers” was the granddaddy of all team-ups; seldom did heroes who commanded their own storylines combine for more than an issue or two.  And the comic books had it easy; to get Captain America and Thor in the same place, you just have to draw them on the same page.   Things get a big more difficult in the movies, with all those actors and contracts and egos in the same place.  The fact that “The Avengers” exists at all is a small miracle; the fact that it’s a solidly entertaining movie and not a trainwreck of personalities is a much bigger one.

Joss Whedon writes and directs this meeting of the muscles. Whedon’s reputation is odd; he’s known as a veritable god of the fanboys, but in all reality, most of his endeavors have been pretty mainstream and commercial, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Serenity” and”Firefly.”  Most people would recognize his work, especially in TV, even if they don’t know his name.  Whedon’s also written a number of comic books, and he brings that sensibility to the script of “Avengers;” it’s a fantastically fun movie full of enough great, hilarious, and action-packed moments that you’ll overlook its ridiculous plot and lapses in reason and judgment.

The bad guy here is Thor’s brother Loki, who, when we saw him last, was banished to a space hole.  He’s found his way out somehow, made an alliance with lizard people, and is now seeking to conquer Earth.  He’s pretty full of himself, and prone to given Shakespearean-toned speeches.  He’s also in possession of some pretty cool toys, including a staff that allows him to control the minds of whoever he touches with it.  He’s after the Tesseract, which is a lot like the Allspark in the “Transformers” movies; Alfred Hitchcock would call both objects a MacGuffin (meaning anything that both sides of a conflict want.) He steals it with relative ease, and the Avengers spend the majority of the movie trying to figure out what he intends to do with it, and where he’s hidden it.

“Avengers” gets a lot of traction out of the clash of egos amongst the team of superheroes; billionaire playboy Tony Stark naturally doesn’t get along with straight-as-an-arrow Captain America, and isn’t afraid to say so.  The same goes for Hulk and Thor. Most of the action sequences in the first half of the film involve good guys fighting other good guys, and I have to say, it’s a ton of fun watching Thor and Iron Man square off.

Mark Ruffalo steps into Edward Norton’s shoes to play David Banner, aka Hulk, when he gets mad, and he steals most of the scenes he’s in, especially when he’s big and green.  Scarlett Johanson gets a lot more to do this time around as Black Widow; she made an appearance in “Iron Man 2,” but seemed extraneous to the storyline there.  Here she’s right in the middle of things.  Jeremy Renner is Hawkeye; he also was briefly in “Thor,” but gets to play both bad guy and good guy here.  Featuring Hawkeye so prominently might have been one of Whedon’s biggest missteps in making this film.  His superpower is that he’s really good with a bow, and it never stops being cheesy to see him whip that thing out and fire off a grenade-tipped arrow, or some such nonsense.  You can get away with a lot of nonsense in comic books.  You can get away with a lot of nonsense in summer blockbuster movies too, but not quite as much.

The film culminates in a battle in, over and around New York City, pitting the six superheroes against a horde of lizards on flying motorbikes, and a few giant caterpillar looking things.  The bad guys viciously attack office buildings, breaking a lot of glass, and the heroes do their best to a) fight them off and b)get innocent  tie-and-business-suit-wearing people to safety.  It’s a great showdown, even if the bad guys are a little underwhelming (sure, six superheroes can take them on, but I think a battalion of Marines could probably do just as well) and Whedon does a fine job of cutting between four or five (or six) different battle scenes without completely confusing us.  The climax is wonderfully satisfying, and elicited a huge laugh out of the audience; it’s a brilliant moment in a movie full of very good moments.

What makes “Avengers” work above and beyond most superhero movies (and let’s be clear, this is one of the top five superhero movies of all time) is the wit and energy Joss Whedon brings to the script and the screen.  He clearly loves these characters on beyond their cool abilities, and knows how to write them so that we will love (or at least like) them too.  “Avengers” is about as close to a perfect summer movie as you’re bound to get; it’s big and loud and funny and clever and fast-paced and just really, really fun.  And it’s only just the beginning of May.  This sets a high bar for the rest of this summer’s movies — there’s plenty of things coming to be excited about (including a couple of other superhero/comic book adaptations) but if anything else manages to be as good or better than “Avengers,” 2012 will be a summer to remember, as 2008 was.

Set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War, War Horse begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him. When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, changing and inspiring the lives of all those he meets-British cavalry, German soldiers, and a French farmer and his granddaughter-before the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of No Man’s Land. The First World War is experienced through the journey of this horse-an odyssey of joy and sorrow, passionate friendship and high adventure. –(C) Dreamworks

Seduced by the challenge of an impossible case, the driven Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) takes the unbalanced yet beautiful Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) as his patient in A Dangerous Method. Jung’s weapon is the method of his master, the renowned Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Both men fall under Sabina’s spell. — (C) Sony Pictures Classics

Ever since his wife was burned in a car crash, Dr. Robert Ledgard, an eminent plastic surgeon, has been interested in creating a new skin with which he could have saved her. After twelve years, he manages to cultivate a skin that is a real shield against every assault. In addition to years of study and experimentation, Robert needed a further three things: no scruples, an accomplice and a human guinea pig. Scruples were never a problem. Marilia, the woman who looked after him from the day he was born, is his most faithful accomplice. And as for the human guinea pig…

– (C) Sony

Juliette Binoche won the Best Actress prize in Cannes for her performance in this playful and provocative romantic drama from legendary auteur Abbas Kiarostami (TASTE OF CHERRY, THE WIND WILL CARRY US), his first feature made outside of Iran. Binoche plays a gallery owner living in a Tuscan village who attends a lecture by a British author (opera star William Shimell) on authenticity and fakery in art. Afterward, she invites him on a tour of the countryside, during which he is mistaken for her husband. They keep up the pretense and continue on their afternoon out, discussing love, life and art, and increasingly behaving like a long-married couple. But are they play-acting on a whim, or is there more to their seemingly new relationship than meets the eye? — (C) IFC

I’m going to shake things up a bit, mostly for my own sake and because this sounds like fun.   For a while (until I get bored with it,) I’m going to write reviews like I’m the professor of a film class, and the movies are students’ final projects.   I’ll grade them, and, just like on the papers I got back from professors in college, I’ll write long comments after the grade on what I liked and didn’t like about their work.

I am aware this seems awfully pretentious.  I am in no way qualified to be a film professor, and the idea that I might have something to teach great directors like Abbas Kiarastomi and Pedro Almodovar (the first two reviews I’ll write this way) is totally preposterous.  I hope you, dear reader, will see this simply as a way to have fun with movie reviews and not as  terribly arrogant posturing on my part.

Jeff Nichols’ “Take Shelter” has, surprisingly, a lot in common with Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.”  Both are films in which the protagonist struggles to deal with mental illness, while the people around them aren’t very sympathetic or helpful: in both films, their friends and family don’t want them to manage the illness, they want the illness to be gone, and their impatience and lack of compassion just makes things harder.   Also, both films are, in unconventional ways, about the end of the world.

In “Take Shelter,” Michael  Shannon plays a southern family man – the strong, silent type – who starts having visions/hallucinations about a gathering storm, the Grandaddy of all storms.  There’s a painful history of mental illness in his family, so he fears that something’s going awry in his head.  Determined to care for his family whatever the situation, but afraid to worry them with what he is seeing, he begins seeking medical help, but at the same time expanding and equipping the storm shelter in his back yard.

Michael Shannon does an incredible job of communicating his character without many words.  It’s hard to even say what he does, except “communicate” – an aura, a mood, a feeling.  Through gestures, stares, postures.   This is great acting.  We see clearly: here is a man who keeps his own counsel, even from his wife, not out of selfishness or lack of trust, but because he believes it is his responsibility to “do his business” without asking for help or burdening anyone else with his challenges or problems.

Jessica Chastain, who plays his wife, is less good.  She has had a great run this year, appearing and impressing in a number of movies.  But here she is good in spots — she generally nails the big scenes — but thin in others.  It might be because she is acting opposite Shannon, who is incredibly talented at communicating a lot with a little.  But her character never feels as fleshed out as his does.  We need to see a woman who knows what she got into when she married this man – he’s not going to communicate much, but he’s going to consistently do the right thing, and that’s why she can love and trust and live with him.  Instead, she comes across as a family manager, bouncing between telling him what he needs to do next (be home showered and dressed by 6pm so we can leave for the parent-teacher conference) and yelling at him for not explaining to her what’s going on with him.  This is not a guy who’s going to explain what’s going on with him.  Working with a script that takes its plausibility seriously, and an actor who really makes his character come alive, Chastain’s performance feels thin and unconvincing.

This is writer/director Jeff Nichols’ second collaboration with Michael Shannon, and it’s easy to see why the two stick together.  It feels a bit like De Niro and Scorsese in the ’70s; here’s an actor that can communicate a director’s vision almost flawlessly. Nichols impressively captures the rhythm and textures of a  small, blue-collar Southern town; one of the pleasures of “Take Shelter” is its small-town rhythms counterbalances with a growing sense of impending doom.   On the flip side, there’s a twist in the last five minutes of the film – after everything seems to be resolved – that comes out of nowhere.  It really could be a great twist, but it lacks the necessary foreshadowing; the film presents itself as clearly, definitely about one thing, then, the eleventh hour, becomes about something else.  It’s really too bad.  If we, the audience had spent more of the movie living in the tension, uncertain which way the wind was going to blow, “Take Shelter” would’ve been a better movie.  It’s a good movie as it is, for sure.  But the ending lacks.

Without really knowing why, I loved “The Muppet Show” when I was a teenager.  We had one of those “free cable for a month” programs that’s intended to get you addicted to 100+ channels so you’ll sign up for the rest of your life, but after about three weeks, we realized the only show we were watching regularly was “The Muppet Show.”  I think I tried to make a case to my parents that “The Muppet Show” was worth $26.99 a month (this was in the days before DVD box sets), but I lost.  They were probably right, but I’m still not sure.

It’s probably best not to think too much about something like the Muppets.  It’s hardly highbrow, intellectually engaging entertainment.  On the other hand, it’s not as purposefully, intentionally stupid as a lot of movie comedies, and that, in part, is why it makes it onto my screen in the first place. At its best, the Muppet schtick is a parody of comedy – it’s bad on purpose, so bad it’s good because it know it’s bad and it knows you know it’s bad.   The new Muppet movie captures that perfectly in one shining moment, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The story centers around Walter, a ℗uppet who desperately whose only dream in life is to be a muppet.  Jason Segel plays his brother, and Amy Adams is his girlfriend.  For their tenth anniversary they head to Hollywood to see the sights, and Walter tags along.  While visiting the rundown Muppet studios, Walter uncovers a plot by oil baron Tex Richman (Cris Cooper) to buy the studio, tear it down, and turn it into an oil field.  In the middle of Hollywood.

The Muppets, disbanded and drifting apart for years and years, are in danger of losing their studio, their history, and even their brand name unless they can raise an enormous sum of money in a ridiculously short time.  Kermit gets everyone back together and stages a telethon – with a kidnapped Jack Black as its host – to raise the money.  And thus we have the setup for a Very Special Episode of the Muppet Show.

I think it’s incredibly difficult to capture the particularly flavor of the old Muppet show and the best of the Muppet movies.  There’s a unique, rare talent involved in writing a joke that’s so bad it’s good.  Jason Segel et al take on the challenge here with obvious love and attention, but the results are hit and miss.  There are some very good moments: for instance, when Kermit and crew hit a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to their comeback about 35 minutes in, Amy Adams quips “this is going to be a really short movie!”   And perhaps the best bit in the film involves Fozzie Bear and the kidnapped, completely unwilling Jack Black doing a comedy routine together.  Fozzie tells a terrible joke. The audience is silent.  Jack Black groans and says “that joke is at least fifty years old!”  The audience roars.  It’s funny because it’s terrible, and because the performers know it’s terrible.   That’s the essence of Muppet humor.

In this movie age when it seems like everything even vaguely popular more than a decade ago is getting revived, reborn, rebooted, and remade, nostalgia often feels cynical – giving people something they already know is an easy way to get butts into movie theater seats.  But “The Muppets” truly feels like a labor of love — it’s risky for an actor like Jason Segel, for whom most of his repertoire is raunch and bawdiness — to throw so fully into something so sweet, corny, and sentimental.  But his heart is on his sleeve here.   “The Muppets” may not be a perfect revival of the old characters, but it has heart, and in the Muppet world, heart is what counts more than anything else.

I went and saw the “The Hunger Games” on Friday night, and was surprised by the diversity of the sold out auditorium.  There weren’t many “young adults,” even though this is a movie based on a Young Adult novel.  This was the 10pm show, so most of them had already seen it and were home and in bed, I suppose.  But there were plenty of married couples, middle-aged folks, and a surprising number of bearded, trucker-hat adorned twenty somethings.  The kind who make fun of the “Twilight” trailer.  Which they did, with great wit. And I thought, “Is Hunger Games really all that different from the Twilight series?”

Apparently it is.  For the first half hour, I felt like I was watching “Schindler’s List.”  Our heroine, Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence) lives in a grimy, grey coal mining town straight out of a Shelby Lee Adams photograph.  Apparently the future doesn’t look much different from the past, at least not for the poor.  We are in District 12, and we learn pretty quickly that each District is required to send two of its young people to the Capitol to take part in a televised fight to the death with the young people from the other eleven districts.  These are the Hunger Games.

Katniss and Peta (Josh Hutcherson) are the two “tributes” from District 12, and they’re groomed at the Capitol for a while prior to the Games.  Everyone at the Capitol wears extravagant and ridiculous clothes and hairstyle; they look like a cross between characters from “The Fifth Element” and ones you might find in the upper crust of Elizabethan England.  The tributes are required to curry favor with the rich and powerful, who are able to send them potentially life-saving gifts in the midst of the Games.  Woody Harrelson plays an alcoholic winner of some long-past version of the games who serves as the two youngsters’ mentor.  A barely recognizable Elizabeth Banks and a strangely subdued Lenny Kravitz are also on their side, training them, prepping them, grooming them.  There are a lot of hazards in the Hunger Games, and not everyone is killed by the opposition: some die of infection, some of exposure, and some are hunted down by giant holographic Rottweilers that appear out of nowhere.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About half of “Hunger Games” is spent setting up the Hunger Games, and once the Games actually begin, I couldn’t help but feel that some of the air went out of this balloon. It’s a difficult position for a director; a lot of time and energy has been spent driving home for us just how terrible these games are, and how even more terrible it is that they’re viewed as entertainment by the friends and family of those who are dying in them.  But here we are, in a movie theater, being entertained by the Games.  Are we supposed to root for our favorite contestants?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to walk out in protest?

Director Gary Ross (or possibly his screenwriters, who include Suzanne Collins, author of the book) handles this in two ways: 1. By making some of the opposing teens clear-cut villains, bloodthirsty and gleeful in their violence–that way it’s easier to cheer for their demise.  And 2. By keeping our heroine’s killings to a minimum.  She does kill a few, but it’s mostly indirectly; at one point she causes a beehive to fall on some bad guys, killing one of them, and later, she makes an apple fall on a landmine to kill some others.  It’s death by proxy. Nothing’s bloody and direct, until the climax, and well, that guy just completely deserves what he gets.

I love that Jennifer Lawrence was cast for this movie, and is a rising star in Hollywood.  To my eye, she is not all that pretty; she doesn’t have big eyes or a huge smile or super defined cheekbones and she’s not all skin and bones like most Hollywood starlets.  Instead, she has true acting chops; she can play tough and angry as well as tender and vulnerable.  I thought she was remarkable last year in “Winter’s Bone;”  it’s great to see her get this much exposure and I hope she continues to show up in movies I want to see.

“The Hunger Games” shares a lot of elements with plenty of other dystopian stories; there are callouts to both “Lord of the Flies” and “Brave New World.”  Chances are freshman English students will be reading the book twenty years from now. But I don’t think this is supposed to be a vision of the possible future so much as a metaphor about what teens go through right now.  It’s so much about reality TV, a culture of violence as entertainment,  oppressive governments, or the rich vs. the poor, though it certainly incorporates elements of all those.  But I think the defining allegory is adolescence and high school.  For many, if not most, teens, high school feels exactly like the Hunger Games – a cutthroat and complicated world where the stakes are life and death.  The adults look on from the outside and keep telling you what a privilege it is to be you, to be going through what you’re going through.  Alliances form and dissolve in the blink of an eye, and if you don’t watch your back and learn to think on your feet, you’re toast.

If you loved “The Hunger Games” and are hungry for more, or alternately, if you thought Hollywood’s take on teens out to cut each other’s throats while adults watch with glee was too sanitized and sentimentalized, let me recommend another movie to you.  “Battle Royale” was made 10 years ago and in Japan, but it’s almost exactly the same storyline, only minimal setup.  It’s both much darker and, because it’s a full-on satire with no bones about being an action flick, generally funnier than “The Hunger Games.”   I’m not going to say it’s a better flick, but it will be better for some, and enjoyable for others.  You might want to keep the 14 year olds away from it, however.