This week's movie releases

Not content with simply churning out sequels and reboots to its Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Hulk movies, Marvel Comics gets them all together for The Avengers. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury is the S.H.I.E.L.D. peace-keeping agency director who recruits the above quartet (played by Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and Mark Ruffalo), plus Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), for a superhero force to save the world. Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, writes and directs.

The Awakening is a haunted house chiller of the kind Spanish cinema has excelled at in recent years, notably with Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage. Director Nick Murphy takes the genre back to its British gothic roots with Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as a debunker of parapsychological hoaxes in post-WWI London, asked by boarding school master Dominic West (The Wire) to investigate a ghostly apparition connected to the death of a pupil. A fanatical skeptic with a tragic past, she quickly gets to the bottom of the case, only to be drawn back by further unexplained events. Hall's character's no-nonsense viewpoint brings a fresh vision and genuine creepiness to the setup, though the resolution is unlikely to astonish anyone familiar with the movie's Spanish cousins.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin, is a Sundance-prized psychological thriller about a delusional young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) trying to renew her life after she escapes from a cult.