Giant flying sea turtles from space? Really? This is the film that is raking in all the cash; the film that has fan boys drooling over their flabby, donut-enhanced bellies - a film with flying sea turtles from space in it?!?

I know this is hard to do, everyone, but sit back objectively and think about the last forty minutes of this film. Is this giant clusterfuck of shit really quality entertainment? Do you really enjoy watching enormous marine reptiles flying across Manhattan while being ridden by poorly rendered skeletal space monkeys? It’s like Transformers ate The Phantom Menace and exploded this sequence out of its distended rectum.

My hopes were minimal before the release of The Avengers but they rose significantly when every man and his dog (and sometimes his cat) told me how great the film was. However, my rising hopes deflated pretty quickly when the film began. Wait a minute, there’s an alien talking incomprehensible gobbledygook. And he looks like Skeletor! Oh, I know what’s happened. They’ve accidentally hooked up Masters of the Universe to the projector. Dolph Lundgren will turn up in a second in his furry loincloth and then we can fix this horrible, horrible mistake.

But Dolph Lundgren never appeared. You mean this is the correct film? Oh fuck me in the head with a pitbull; this is going to be a long evening!

Perhaps I’m being a little severe. The Avengers is most definitely not a horrible film. It’s just a crushingly mediocre one that has inexplicably been lavished with praise. I’m sorry but a half a dozen decent quips doesn’t make for a great movie.

Following the Skeletor nonsense, the film continues on shaky legs. Some eggheads gather around the film’s MacGuffin (some cube thing that can be used for cheap energy and which can create portals through space) and then everything gets a bit Stargate. The film’s bad guy, Loki, suddenly appears through a portal and proceeds to either kill or ‘turn’ people to his side. The way that he enslaves people is by prodding them with his gnarly space sceptre of convincement. One touch and they’re his drones. It’s all a bit rushed and doesn’t set the stage particularly well.

Thankfully the film improves significantly after this. Once Loki is out in the wild, doing his thing (being a colossal dick is what he does best), Nick Fury gets to assemble The Avengers. Where the film succeeds is in the inter-personal relationships between the heroes. The action scenes are a colossal disappointment and amongst some of the most boring stuff I’ve seen in recent years, but the friction between the protagonists and some of the humour that ensues is really well done.

There’s also some nice moral ambiguity. At the beginning it seems like Nick Fury’s espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. is working entirely for the good of man. There’s this crazy guy loose in the world and they want to bring him down. But then we find out that S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the MacGuffin to develop super powerful weaponry against an alien invasion. One can see both sides of the coin. The negative: once you build these weapons, you can’t undo it; they’re always going to be there and they can cause your destruction. The positive: you want to protect yourself from hostile forces; you don’t want to be powerless. So like the atomic bomb; it might have saved us from an even longer war but it also opened Pandora’s Box.

There’s also a thread of hero worship that runs through the film. Agent Coulson (one of Nick Fury’s closest colleagues) is a huge Captain America fan and boasts of having valuable Captain America trading cards. After Coulson gets killed by Loki, Nick Fury shows the bloody Captain America trading cards that Coulson was apparently carrying on his person. This revelation lights a fire under everyone and allows Captain America and Tony Stark to get over their differences and work together as team. We then find out that the cards were never in Coulson’s pocket and that Fury used this as a way of motivating the team. It’s a pretty despicable act but one that is done for the greater good - this lie binds everyone together and allows them to finally act as a team.

I also enjoyed the film’s sense of humour. There are several parts that stand out. The clueless Captain America finally getting a reference because it relates to The Wizard of Oz (Captain America has been frozen in ice and so every modern pop culture reference goes over his head), Tony Stark making a quip about Shakespeare in the park as he, Thor and Captain America battle it out in the middle of a forest, and best of all, The Hulk beating the shit out of Loki.

This last scene was surprisingly hilarious. The rather pompous Loki tells the Hulk that he’s a god and that he won’t be bullied by such a dull creature. The Hulk then grabs Loki like a rag doll and smashes him repeatedly into the ground, calling him a ‘puny god’. The timing and the animation are magnificent.

Sadly this moment of comic relief occurs in the huge clusterfuck at the end of the movie. Towards the end, I really just didn’t care anymore. I just wanted the film over. Whedon tries to inject a bit of pathos by trying to convince us that Tony Stark might die but we all know that he’ll be fine. So therefore we have to endure about forty minutes of poorly designed pixels flinging themselves around. A bit of restraint can be a wonderful thing.

And I have to roll my eyes if I hear another person say that this is the definitive interpretation of the Hulk. Sorry, but as maligned as it is, I still love Ang Lee’s Hulk. As far as comic book movies go, only Nolan’s Batman movies can light a candle to it.

But the people have spoken and the cash registers are bulging. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more Avengers to come, but I doubt I’ll be there.

Blindness is a film that was reviled by the majority of critics. Everyone seemed to agree that it was worthless. And because of this, I ended up avoiding the movie when it was released in cinemas. My reasoning was that surely this many people couldn’t be wrong.

Well, they were. Fernando Meirelles’ film is tough and uncompromising, but it isn’t the cinematic atrocity that people have tarred it as.

The story revolves around a mass outbreak of sightlessness. Person after person becomes afflicted until eventually the government has to declare a state of emergency and herd the blind people into a few hospital wards in order to try and contain the unknown disease.

One of the first people to be quarantined is a doctor (Mark Ruffalo). Joining him is his wife (Julianne Moore), who actually feigns blindness in order to be with her husband. And even though the disease/infection/outbreak spreads throughout the whole of society, she seems immune.

We never know why she doesn’t succumb; we’re never given an explanation. But being the one person that can still see, she gets to witness the breakdown of society.

Some people have claimed that the depiction of blind people in this film is offensive. This is ridiculous. The film has nothing to do with the sightlessness that afflicts people in the real world. This film is about the chaos that ensues when people can no longer share another person’s point of view. In this film that is taken literally, but in Blindness you can see echoes of real life. One example that springs to mind is the craziness that happened in Germany during World War Two. Not everyone who committed atrocities was a monster. Many of them were perfectly ordinary people, but because they were caught up in this wave and because they could no longer see someone else’s point of view (or were allowed to), they performed heinous acts. So therefore Moore’s character might represent the person/country/society that is faced with an overwhelming social crisis – how they respond will define them.

As you’d expect, when two hospital wards begin squabbling over food, Moore tries to negotiate. But when this proves to be pointless, Moore buries her head in the sand. Again I’m inclined to drawl parallels with World War Two. The British tried negotiating with the Nazis and then later they curled up into a little ball. Well, until the Nazis invaded Poland...

Moore snaps during the film’s most brutal scene. You see, you have one ward that is run by the doctor and his wife and another that is run by a genuine blind person (someone who was blind prior to the outbreak) and a ‘King’. The ward run by the King takes the food that the government occasionally sends their way and then makes the rival ward pay for the grub. At first the people in the doctor’s ward pay with valuable possessions (again, like in a concentration camp, people are stripped of their belongings – they’re stripped of their individuality), but then the king ups the stakes by making them pay with their women.

Initially, Moore goes along with the plan. After all, they need food, so they should just go along with it, right? But when one of the women is killed, something inside her snaps.

This brutal act draws a line in the sand. Moore can take blackmail and she can suffer personal humiliation, but the casual violence that is inflicted upon a defenceless woman is too much. She intervenes with ruthless efficiency.

Moore waits until the next mass rape and then kills the King, saying that things are different now. From now on, she’s collecting food from Ward 3. If they don’t pay, she’ll keep on killing their men. It’s a vicious response, but it’s pretty much the only course of action available to her if she wants to survive.

As the only sighted person, Moore has a heavy weight on her shoulders. She’s almost a godlike figure, able to pass judgement on those around her and smite them with relative ease if she so chooses. But with her husband, we see what happens when you’re in a position of power and everything is taken away from you. He resents having to be treated like a baby and hates losing his independence. He even cheats on his wife because he feels so inferior to her. The natural instinct, when the world is turned on its head, is to fight and thrash and lash out. It takes a lot of strength to keep things together.

And despite the film’s supposed ugliness, I found it to be quite an uplifting movie. A small group leaves the hospital (the guards who control the outside of the building abandons it, presumably after having gone blind themselves) and makes its way back to the doctor’s house. There they live together and look after one another. This is the sort of response that one would hope would develop in a mass crisis. You’d hope that people would pull together and look out for one another. And the fact that these people do this ends the film with a note of optimism. There’s no need for us to live in a manmade hell.

However, the ending does raise a question. At the end, a man mysteriously regains his sight. Does this mean that everyone else will, too? The way that we see Moore gazing upon the city from her balcony would indicate this. But does that mean that everything will return to normal? That people will go back to their normal ways; that this happy group will separate? Does it mean that after temporarily gaining some form of clarity, laziness and neglect will return to this society? Does it mean that we’ll return to our more regular form of blindness? Most probably, yes.

While Dirty Harry was a magnificent example of fantastical Hollywood filmmaking, a story that while gloriously entertaining didn’t try and reflect the real world, Zodiac is a more grounded attempt at telling the story of a serial killer loose in San Francisco. Yes Fincher’s direction is as flamboyant as ever and yes it’s a glossy big budget movie, but with its emphasis on the minutia of detective work and with its unresolved ending, it’s a brave attempt at reflecting the reality of the case. The film doesn’t provide you with any answers – it’s a mystery that will remain as such long after the credits have rolled.

The film opens on the 4th July in 1969. Fireworks fill the sky and we see a young man take a ride in a car with an older woman. It’s an idealistic picture of America – a couple going to a diner, a nation celebrating its independence, the last summer of a great decade. But despite the fireworks and the promises of a brighter future, there’s a dark shadow looming around the corner. America’s innocence, if it ever existed, isn’t going to last long.

The attack on the two kids is a superb piece of cinema. We see them awkwardly talking as they pull up by a lake and then a car appears behind them. At first its headlights shine brightly, but then they’re turned off, adding to the unspoken menace. But then the car drives off. However, it’s not long before it returns. With the light from a flashlight shining in their eyes, they maybe think it’s a cop, but then the shadowy figure opens fire on them. It’s a senseless attack, and one that is masterfully filmed, edited and scored – I love the use of Donovan’s ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’; it’s a psychedelic rock song, one that while seemingly upbeat and positive has a dark undercurrent to it. It works perfectly for the scene. And then after the attack we see the boy sitting outside his car, near the point of death, as the Zodiac phones the authorities to tell them of his crime. The calmness of his voice is quietly chilling, as is the way he says, ‘Good-bye’ like it’s two separate words. Here’s a person who is killing just for the thrill of it.

The second attack isn’t the grandstanding piece of cinema that the first is, but it’s equally effective. We see another young couple driving to a lake. There they encounter a masked man with a gun. He says he’s escaped from prison and the couple think they’re just going to be robbed. The young man even offers to write the masked man a cheque. But then after being tied up and after assuring his female companion that everything is going to be okay, the masked man casually stabs them. It’s shocking in how nonchalantly they’re attacked – their daytrip may consist of a picnic and kisses by the lake, but the Zodiac’s idea of fun is completely different. And there’s a great moment where after being tied up, the man asks the Zodiac if the gun was even loaded. The Zodiac then holds the gun close to his face and shows that yes it was loaded. It’s a great moment because the gun is distorted by the camera lens – it looks even larger and therefore more threatening; our lives hang by a thread and it takes very little for someone to come along and snuff us out of existence.

And it’s maybe that sort of power that the serial killer has over us that makes them so fascinating. They don’t adhere to the rules that society lays down for the rest of us. Therefore we’re amazed by them and maybe we even admire them in a perverse way. We want to hate them, but at the same we want to consume every lurid detail of their exploits and maybe even indulge in daydreams about the people we’d off if we were batshit crazy like they are. Or if we don’t have some sort of distant, guilty admiration for their utter lack of self-control, we want to at least understand them; we want an insight into their twisted soul. And of course, this hunger for answers is even more pressing when so few are made available to us.

This is why Robert Graysmith invests himself so deeply in the case. He wants to understand. He wants answers. But it says something sad about human nature when he finds a killer more fascinating than his children or his wife. Somehow we’re acknowledging that serial killers are extraordinary simply because they refuse to go along with the rest of us. They don’t create anything, they don’t expand our understanding of life and the cosmos. But because they don’t listen to the little voice in our heads that says ‘no’, they immediately become worthy of our attention.

But despite the attention that we lavish on them, what would we really find out if we could get into their heads? That they hate? That they’re mad? The answers will always be mundane, but a desire for answers will remain as long as the killer is unidentified. Wars we can understand. Natural disasters can be explained. Diseases don’t even perturb us that much because we arrogantly feel that we can do something to avoid getting them. But we need to unmask serial killers because we need the reassurance – we need to know that the person is really human, that there isn’t a supernatural demon lurking in the shadows that is going to snatch us away without warning.

The film taps into this wonderfully. Robert Graysmith’s whole quest is a quest for this reassurance. He needs to be able to look someone in the eye and know it’s them – he needs to know that it’s a mere mortal who is out there. This leads him down various dark alleys, one of which involves him going to a man’s house in order to talk to a friend of a suspect. Graysmith has a sample of what he thinks is the Zodiac’s handwriting, only to find out that the handwriting belongs to the man he’s speaking to. Graysmith is then led down into the basement where he hears the floorboards creaking above him. It’s a very creepy scene, but we’re denied any payoff. Graysmith isn’t attacked and the killer isn’t revealed. The mystery remains.

After that, Graysmith tries to bully the sister of a victim into naming the killer. He just wants an answer; he wants it to be over – briefly he doesn’t care about the truth. But then he finds out about one of the prime suspects.

Arthur Leigh Allen is the only serious suspect that the film puts forward. But at the same time we’re never told that it’s him. We only have the information that the investigation gives us, that the man was a paedophile, that he owned guns, that his timeline fitted with the Zodiac, that he blabbed important information to a fishing buddy, that his watch bears the name zodiac and that it has the crosshair logo that the Zodiac’s letters used, and that he was spotted on the weekend of one of the murders with bloody knifes in his car that were supposedly used to slaughter a chicken. But even though we have all of this information, along with tasty titbits that his freezer is full of dead squirrels and that he fucks himself in the arse with a wooden dildo, there’s still nothing concrete to tie him to the killings. Like Robert Graysmith and the detectives who investigated the case, we can only look at him and draw our own conclusions on all the circumstantial evidence. Everything screams that this is the man, but we never know for certain.

Hollywood thinking dictates that a lack of a firm resolution is deeply unsatisfying, but this most certainly isn’t the case for Zodiac. The film ends with a victim identifying Arthur Leigh Allen as his attacker, but the man can’t say for certain. And although at the end we discover that Allen died of a heart attack before he could be interviewed again, DNA evidence supposedly cleared him. A concrete answer would only turn the Zodiac into another serial killer, but without it he obtains almost mythic status. He becomes the bogeyman we all fear but which we’re fascinated by.

But although I love the mythic side to the film (ending the film with ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ is a master touch, reminding it as it does of the first killing and suggesting that the Zodiac might still be out there), it also works wonderfully as a police procedural. We see the bureaucracy that the detectives face and the hurdles they have to overcome in order to do their job. There’s a great little scene where the cops have to put their case forward in order to get a warrant to search Allen’s premises. Unlike Dirty Harry it’s not a simple case of finding the guy and then blowing him away.

And there’s also something quite sad in the amount of time that is dedicated to hunting this one individual (if the Zodiac was indeed one individual). Years go by, people grow older and yet the detectives are still on the case. One beautiful sequence illustrates this perfectly – we see the Trans America Pyramid being built. Everything around these people is changing as they’re hunting a phantom from the past.

However, for Anthony Edwards’ cop it all proves too much. After years he quits the case. In an understated scene we see him say goodbye to his partner with very few words expressed between the two. There are lots of emotions there, but neither can express them.

But one of the most memorable images from the film is of the detectives walking through a maze of superimposed words. No one can see the wood for the trees. Has this man killed as many people as he claims? Is he a liar who takes credit for other people’s work? Either way his campaign was a success. With the help of the media he created a myth and a mystery that hasn’t been solved, and as long as that mystery remains he’ll always be exceptional. People may want to solve the mystery, but it’ll only remain interesting while the answer is elusive.