Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Unnecessarily long at three hours, Endgame‘s grand space-opera does provide plenty of room for its top acting talent to show their wares in a surprisingly emotional and risk-taking finale to Marvel Studios’ ambitious Phase One.

Peppered with comic one-liners and emotional one-to-ones, Endgame manages to pull off a multi-threaded, timey-wimey, convoluted, three-act series of adventures concluding with the mother of epic battles in which the assembled Avengers (basically everybody from 21 marvel movies) manage to undo the damage of Infinity War. What, you thought Marvel would kill off the other half of it’s cash cows?

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Captain Marvel (2019)

Muscling in on Wonder Woman territory, Brie Larson’s space-faring super-heroine Captain Marvel bridges the gap to Avengers: Endgame with a surprising This Girl Can tale, lining her up as the cavalry to save the day. Meanwhile Samuel L. Jackson’s remarkably aged-down Nick Fury dial’s it down from his usual 11 to a restrained supporting 7 on the acting amp.

If you can stick with the massive chunks of sci-fi, then you’ll cope with trainee warrior Veers (Larson – Room) being patronised and mentored by Kree special forces commander Yon-Rog (Jude Law, Arthur‘, Grindelwald) in preparation for operations against the shape-shifting Skrulls.

Alita (2019)

Depending on your point of view, Alita is either a fine addition to an established live-action Manga genre, or James Cameron blatantly ripping off Pinochio in the Shell with added Rollerball. Either way it’s a large slice of metal-fetishist robo-porn from Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, saved by a superb motion-capture by Rosa Salazar as the amnesiac cyborg killing machine.

The Lego Movie (2014)

Catching up with the first of the franchise: the remarkably simple character animation contrasts wildly with the over-cranked, bonkers action sequences to create a family adventure that is everything Ready Player One should have been. With a non-stop conveyor of genre-subverting satire, one-liners, sight-gags and pop-culture riffs, everything is indeed awesome.

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019)

Writer/director Joe Cornish delivers a proper junior adventure – a modern-day Sword in the Stone that is part Famous Five, part Sarah-jane Adventures (©Dr Who), part BBC Sunday serial, part Children’s Film Foundation nostalgia trip from the 1970’s.

Quintessentially British to it’s core, the slightly ramshackle, not-quite-Harry-Potter-ness of it is entirely elevated by the junior cast abetted by Patrick Stewart and Rebecca Fergusson.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)

Dreamworks rounds off it’s animated Dragon trilogy with a superlative coming-of-age adventure. It’s a charmingly bonkers fantasy world of goofy dragons, Scottish vikings, American teens, F. Murray Abraham voicing a Max Von Sudow villain; this time injected with some properly Y-A themes of taking on adult responsibility. And if that sounds all too grown up, just sit back and enjoy the flying sequences.

Romancing the Sword

The final release poster for Alita: Battle Angel is out and she’s holding some weirdly unidentifiable, but cool-looking sword. A 26th-century cyborg still needs a sword.

Cue Hellboy reboot and in the poster, the guy who carries an unfeasibly large calibre revolver is holding… a sword. As is… Transformer‘s own Optimus Primus Stove, a thirty-foot alien robot from another planet last seen wielding a dirty great sword, which presumably transforms into, I dunno, a roofer’s scaffold tower?