Just when you thought the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp thing was done after the tepidly received Alice in Wonderland, along comes another collaboration between the out-of-his-tree director and off-the-wall actor in Dark Shadows – a big screen update of the late 1960s American TV show.

Perhaps better served as a signature stop motion animation, Burton transfers the look of masterpieces The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride to the live action arena: Johnny Depp’s character and the story itself are both straight out of the frames of these films.

So what of the story? Well, Depp is Barnabas Collins, heir to a successful fisheries cannery in the town of Collinsport, so named as a result of the family’s success. When he spurns the beautiful Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) and she turns out to be a witch, she puts a curse on him, turning him into a vampire and burying him alive so that he may suffer for all eternity. When he is accidentally released 200 years later, he finds himself in the year 1972. Returning to his estate, he discovers his descendants and a world very different to the one he left behind. Angelique, however, remains…

Dark Shadows is a visual treat. Tim Burton is great at assembling and crafting gothic imagery on screen and though creatively it may lack a little innovation and flair (its big budget is presumably to blame), there are moments that make your mouth fall open, such as Eva Green’s skin cracking like china, which is beautifully, seamlessly realised.

Sadly, its visuals are among the limited outstanding parts of a film that is otherwise quite ordinary. Dark Shadows is a pedestrian comedic gothic horror tale that brings nothing new to the table that, say, The Addams Family and Burton’s own back catalogue haven’t already served up in far more interesting and imaginative ways.

With make-up, costume and a tone akin to Burton’s stop motion fare, it’s difficult not to make comparisons, the conclusion drawn being that this would have possessed more charm and elicited more fond laughter as another animated delight. As it is, the humour frequently fails to raise a titter – partly due to uninspired writing but also through the actors’ performances.

Watching Dark Shadows is like realising once and for all that Burton has lost his mojo. Jonny Lee Miller as Roger Collins is the underused highlight in a film that fails to exploit its cast’s talents – there’s Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter and Chloe Moretz here, who all disappoint. Miller, by contrast, is priceless with his hilarious expressions and pitch perfect delivery, and he’d surely steal the movie if his role was bigger.

Perhaps it’s time for Burton to drop Depp and his other collaborators and look to a new muse instead. Are you available, Mr Miller?

If you’re experiencing serious withdrawal symptoms from a dearth of laddish japes and lewd humour, you need suffer no more – because the original American Pie team is back, nine years after their last outing.

Where third instalment American Pie: The Wedding charted the bringing together of the high school friends and family of Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) for their impending marriage, American Pie: Reunion once again assembles the sex-obsessed group of guys and gals we’re all familiar with – this time for one last hurrah on the occasion of their high school reunion.

Most of the old crew – Jim, Michelle, Oz (Chris Klein), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Finchy (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Heather (Mena Suvari) and Vicky (Tara Reid) – have left their gawky, awkward, sexually inexperienced selves behind as they tackle the landmarks of adulthood – marriage, fatherhood and responsibilities. But as they congregate on their old stomping ground, they’re thrown right back into the mix, with old feelings, temptations and situations resurfacing. A doddle for this group of morally-upstanding grown ups to deal with, right?

Well, maybe, if it wasn’t for Stifler (Seann William Scott). The only one of the group that hasn’t progressed mentally, emotionally, or in any way whatsoever, it’s going to be harder than it at first seems to make it through the reunion unscathed…

The American Pie films have certainly never been bastions of morality, and from the very first super-successful film in the franchise they’ve had a distasteful misogynistic streak running through, tempered in the original by the likeability of the characters and the (albeit juvenile) laughs on offer.

However, in this latest offering from a franchise that relies on bawdy comedy, the scenarios make even more uncomfortable viewing as they threaten to tip over into totally inappropriate territory. And at the centre, you’ll usually find Stifler.

With the majority of the characters exhibiting a strong moral code, the overall tone is less rage-inducingly sexist but those scenes that are… well, they’re just offensive and off-putting. The scenes where Stifler attempts to steal a glance and a grope of a naked and comatose teenage girl are skin-crawling.

A mix of comedy (there are a smattering of laugh out loud moments), wince-worthy sequences and nostalgia, American Pie: Reunion is more watchable than you might think despite the misogyny, and fans of the coarse sex comedy series probably won’t be disappointed.

As it looks back over the series, recalls key moments and rounds out the tale of the eight friends, American Pie: Reunion certainly feels like a swansong but the business it’s done since its release suggests audiences are still in the market for more vulgar gross-out humour from Jim Levenstein & co.

Joss Whedon is the man of the moment. Having scripted genre-bending indie horror Cabin in the Woods, currently in cinemas, and having shown previous form on the small screen with television hits Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and cult sci-fi series Firefly, Whedon has turned his talents to one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, scripting and directing Avengers Assemble.

Bringing together Marvel characters from films we’ve already seen – namely Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans), the film throws in a few more, including a brand new Hulk (prepare for a Hulk reboot starring the latest actor to take on the role of Bruce Banner, Mark Ruffalo), and two superpower-less but super-skilled additions in Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner).

When evil adversary Loki (Tom Hiddleston) gets his hands on the Cosmic Cube with the intention of harnessing its awesome power and using it to achieve his nefarious aims, it is up to S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and colleague Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) to convince the disparate band of superheroes to team up in order to defeat Loki and thwart the threat he poses to the universe. So far, so superherotastic.

But with a running time falling just short of two and a half hours, you’ll need some stamina to endure the film’s action set pieces in the first half. To start with, and for an hour or more, Avengers Assemble is a passive viewing experience and you really need to have seen the other films in the franchise to make sense of motivations, and whip up any dormant passion for these characters. And even then, dull and disorientating action sequences continually juxtaposed with low-key scenes of expositional dialogue are a mind numbing fast-track to boresville.

The engagement builds, however, as it edges towards the finale and you become more emotionally involved as it intersperses the action more competently with interaction between the characters and humorous one-liners, quips and visual gags.

It certainly can’t be easy to assimilate so many sources, keep everybody happy and make a coherent, entertaining movie – there are comic books and the other films in the Marvel stable to take into account, as well as several main protagonists to weave seamlessly into the story. And Whedon manages pretty well, given the obstacles.

Pick of the bunch in terms of watchable performances is Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, in a role that seems tailor-made for him but Ruffalo makes a decent mild-mannered Bruce Banner, and Johannson is strong and sexy as the kick-ass Black Widow.

On this evidence and taking note of its success to date, the Marvel universe looks set to expand further, with spin off movies for both Hawkeye and Black Widow mooted alongside a second Iron Man sequel and the previously mentioned Hulk reboot – which should please comic book fans and a certain segment of cinemagoers alike, even if some of us remain less than impressed.

When Danny Boyle first injected his screen incarnation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting into the public bloodstream back in the mid-nineties, it had audiences buzzing like never before.

A grittily realistic Scottish drama about heroin addiction, it certainly didn’t pull any punches in its depiction of  the harrowingly vacant lives of a group of smack heads.

Now, 16 years after the publication of Welsh’s follow-up book Ecstasy (a collection of three short stories), Canadian director Rob Heydon has finally seen his own labour of love (he secured the movie rights to Welsh’s book back in 2000) make it to moviedom, presumably with grand hopes of affecting audiences in a similar way.

Set against the backdrop of dance music and the clubbing scene, Heydon’s Ecstasy finds itself batting off unfair yet inevitable comparisons to Boyle’s breakthrough feature but does a sterling job of distinguishing itself in the way it’s told. At the same time, Heydon sees no shame in riding on the forerunner’s coattails  - the same artist has created both distinctive posters for one thing – if it helps find an audience for the film into which he’s invested so much time, effort and money.

At heart, Heydon’s Ecstasy is a warm-the-cockles tale of love with an overarching comic tone and a far less fatalistic – and depressing – message than its progenitor: the Scottish setting and narcotics-related narrative are really where the similarities end.

It eschews Boyle’s predilection for magic realism to make way for a focus on the tender and touching relationship that forms between the two leads, and to avoid compromising the integrity of the grittier drug-centred aspects. By the end of the film, main protagonist and quasi-antihero Lloyd (Adam Sinclair) finds himself redeemed by love, having become trapped in a cycle of drug-running from Amsterdam and nightly partying with a group of friends that includes Woodsy (Billy Boyd), Ally (Keram Malicki Sanchez) and Hazel (Olivia Andrup).

The film explores ecstasy, first as a drug and the chemically-induced feelings it produces, universalising the ‘artificial highs’ theme with an accompanying commentary on alcohol, and then measures it against the natural high – the ecstasy – of falling in love. The careful balance of menace and lightness means the film never tips over into an utterly desolate portrait of drug culture and yet it anchors the film firmly enough in reality to maintain a ‘could happen’ feel when the eyes-meeting-across-a-crowded-room fairytale romance kicks in.

Sweet and affecting, the relationship that builds between Lloyd and troubled Canadian beauty Heather (Kristin Kreuk) is characterised by elements we can identify with – shyness, awkwardness, a certain look in the eye and a gallant gesture – allowing us to believe in the love affair completely and permitting us to feel moved by it. Complete with scenes that make us wince and squirm, as well as those that make us smile and smirk, Ecstasy is a commendable debut from a Canadian director who has great affection for his Scottish subject matter.

A genre-mashing horror flick from the joint penmanship of cult Firefly/Buffy/Angel creator Joss Whedon and Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard, you say? Yes please.

On paper, The Cabin in the Woods excites, with its promise of action mixed with horror, and its pledge of a dash of sci-fi, smattering of satire and dose of deliciously dry wit to stoke the fires of anticipation.

But something kinda screwy happens as Whedon and Goddard try to transfer their television writing skills (Goddard has written episodes of Lost and Alias as well as Angel and Buffy) to the big screen, and they find the 90-minute format with all its constraints compromises them too much.

That isn’t to say that The Cabin in the Woods isn’t irredeemable; it’s just that with hopes so high, it’s hugely disappointing that its potential is never reached.

It begins in traditional slasher flick fashion. Channelling Friday the 13th and other stalk and slash pics that followed in its wake, a group of young people, including Thor himself, Aussie hunk Chris Hemsworth, head off to a remote log cabin for a hedonistic getaway. But despite warnings of trouble ahead, they end up getting more – much more – than they bargained for. Will they get out alive?

Though The Cabin in the Woods is aimed squarely at the same audience that lapped up Buffy and Angel, the film relies too heavily on frat pack humour and on sending up the horror genre to capture the cleverness inherent in both teen-to-twentysomething orientated series.

Instead, it takes a back step into early 90s territory and the likes of Scream, which subverts and pastiches horror; highly original in its day but all but killed off by a flock of copycats.

Where British filmmakers like Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and Paul Andrew Williams (The Cottage) have gone on to make credible and effective comedy horrors since then, for every Shaun, there are a gazillion Lesbian Vampire Killers – proving that these days good comedy-horrors are the exception rather than the rule; it’s incredibly tricky to strike the right balance between the two seemingly disparate genres.

A couple of films that pre-date all of these, The Evil Dead (and its sequels) and An American Werewolf in London, get the balance spot on to create cult favourites that are simultaneously smart, scary, funny and cool, and this is what The Cabin in the Woods aspires to be. However, the film tips too heavily in the favour of laboured, obvious humour at the expense of creating genuine moments of horror and as a result, it suffers.

In its favour, the story is unpredictable and original, if only in its splicing together of genres. It’s true to say that in the best postmodernist fashion, it references films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Cube, Deliverance, My Little Eye, the recent The Hunger Games and numerous other also-rans and influences,  and it’s a wildly bewildering ride for the viewer.

But in its efforts to squeeze so much into its 95 minute running time, it becomes jack of all trades, master of none. This means scares are minimal, gore is diminished and humour too broad and not inventive enough. It never gives enough of any one thing to fully satisfy. A great shame; it could have been so much more.

It was always going to be easy to sneer at StreetDance 2. It’s a film aimed squarely at the X-Factor generation, adolescent fans of pop culture who subsist on manufactured music, mainstream fare and cookie cutter idols. But the fact is, StreetDance 2 has no pretensions; it doesn’t promise to be something that it’s not. What you see is what you get, and there’s something refreshing about that.

A sequel to the popular original British-made StreetDance movie, StreetDance 2 shuffles the dance action to locations around the world, including Paris, Rome, Berlin and London and loosely knits a story about a dance competition and a pair of star-crossed lovers into a dance-focussed series of sequences and set pieces.

With dance currently back in fashion, there’s no doubting that this film will find an audience. The impact dance troupes like Britain’s Got Talent alumni Diversity and Flawless have had and the success of shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing on Ice shout it from the rooftops: people have fallen in love with dance again. Not since the 1980s and films like Fame, Footloose and Dirty Dancing has dance been so big.

And just like Diversity and Flawless, fellow Britain’s Got Talent graduate, street dancer George Sampson, embodies that trend. Now 18, Sampson is far removed from the wet-behind-the-ears 14-year-old that won the second series of Britain’s Got Talent, and though dancing is his forte, he proves his likeability and charisma through acting as Eddie in StreetDance 2.

The story here is really incidental; the dance sequences are the stars of this film. The fusion of Latin and street dance whips up an impressive 3D spectacle that will frequently leave dance lovers open mouthed.

The film is cheesy, bad even at times, but it’s fast paced, good-humoured and delivers some breathtaking dance sequences.

With paid-for gravitas brought to the production in the form of Tom Conti as the protective father of Eva (Sofia Boutella), the female lead, StreetDance 2 may not be cinema gold but it is wholesome family entertainment with a feelgood factor.

Amid a marketing frenzy, people seem to be ravenous right now for The Hunger Games. If you’re not quite sure where this voracious appetite for the film version of the first in a trilogy of books for ‘young adults’ came from, then you’re probably outside its target demographic.

The latest page-to-screen tween-to-teen phenomenon may knock spots off its Twilight and Harry Potter rivals but it suffers from a fatal flaw – watching it makes you lament the fact that it’s not made for a more mature audience – even if you are a young adult. Had it been, it would have been more brutal, more bloody and more hard-hitting. It would have conveyed its points more effectively and, quite simply, it would have been better.

In its favour, it was co-adapted for the screen by its writer, Suzanne Collins, who also co-produced the film and as such it sticks pretty close to the original story. Set in a post-apocalyptic North America, where past rebellions by the 13 poverty-stricken individual districts against the governing body, the Capitol, have left the nation of Panem a war-torn ruin. The Hunger Games picks up the tale some years after the Capitol’s overwhelming victory.

To punish its citizens and as a potent reminder of its authority, the Capitol established the Hunger Games – an annual televised event where a boy and a girl from each of the remaining 12 districts must fight to the death until just one remains.

When Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to take her younger sister’s place, she’s determined to get through and must draw on all her pluck, strength and wits to survive. Can she triumph against impossible odds and ever-changing goal posts? There may be a chance she’ll survive but in the Hunger Games, there are no winners…

At first glance, The Hunger Games appears to be a tantalising blend of Stephen King-scribed story The Running Man, Japanese shocker Battle Royale and Jim Carrey satire The Truman Show, but it doesn’t measure up to any of these. Crucially, all these films, which tackle similar themes such as the cult of celebrity and our obsession with reality TV, were made for adult audiences and with these movies front of mind, the potential of The Hunger Games to be great is unavoidably tethered.

The Hunger Games is also spoiled by its over-use of the handheld camera. Frequently trained on Jennifer Lawrence’s face, and shaking about so much we barely see any of the kill sequences, it’s presumably a deliberate ploy in order to fulfil its remit to gain a 12A certificate. But it’s really flipping vertigo-inducingly off-putting.

Death scenes are consequently insubstantial and disappointing – the film skips through them breezily meaning the impact is drained from what should be the film’s most significant incidents, and we know so little about the characters beyond Katniss‘s district that we barely even care when the next despatch comes.

The film’s best and most unsettling bits are those moments with hideous show host Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) – all super-bright smile, polished skin and bouffant hair – in front of a baying live studio audience, although he’s no match for The Running Man’s Killian.

An ill-fitting, semi-comedic cameo from musician Lenny Kravitz as a stylist messes with the film’s tonal balance, while a chillingly gruesome Elizabeth Banks injects unease.

Much better fare for consumption by its proposed teenage audience than tales of boy wizards and human-vampire love stories, its messages are pertinent and will provide food for thought, even if by the end of the visual banquet, you’re left just a bit unsatisfied.

Remember Dexter Fletcher? If you’re a child of the 80s, you’ll possibly remember him as the American teenager in children’s TV show Press Gang. Or maybe you first encountered him before then as the cute kid in Bugsy Malone or The Elephant Man. Whatever, Dexter Fletcher has been through a fair amount of ups and downs since his days as a promising child actor, including a career nosedive which saw him experience a spell sleeping in his car, as well as an acting comeback with high-ish profile roles in both film and TV. He’s now graduated to the heady heights of directing, and his first attempt at a feature film is a sterling effort.

When Bill Haywood (Charlie Creed-Miles) returns home from an 8-year stay in prison, he finds his two sons Dean (Will Poulter) and Jimmy (Sammy Williams), now 15 and 12, abandoned by their mother and fending for themselves. With social services on their case, Dean blackmails the feckless reluctant father into sticking around so they don’t get taken into care. As Bill starts to embrace his responsibilities, he finds a reason to re-build a life for himself – but can he keep himself and his family away from the murky underworld to which he used to belong and, perversely, will he have to risk going back inside in order to do it?

Fletcher’s directorial debut is smart, funny, unsettling and unexpectedly charming. It’s an uneasy balance of humour and tension – there’s a dark tone running through that pits itself against the film’s lighter, comedic moments, like a tug-of-war, and this threatens to overwhelm its charm at times. But that’s okay. It makes for an interesting, compelling mix. Indeed, Fletcher directs with flair, confidence and an assured touch, even if he’s let down sometimes by the odd moment of amateurishness in the screenplay.

Charlie Creed-Miles, meanwhile, puts in one of the most surprisingly endearing anti-hero performances you’ll ever see as he struggles to turn his life around, refusing to be drawn back into the shady gangland  he was once deeply entrenched in.

There’s a great supporting cast too, with Andy Serkis, Leo Gregory and Liz White all shining, while Will Poulter gives a glimpse of great things.

Influenced heavily by the classic Western, scenes are put together in homage to the genre to mimic typical Western scenarios or motifs – for example, there’s a saloon-style stand-off towards the end (which I won’t spoil), while Creed-Miles is pure cowboy in his inability to fit into either the civilised world or the wilderness (criminal underworld, in this case).

This enjoyable and impressive British debut augurs well for Fletcher. We’ll all certainly be watching closely for his next project behind the camera.

No one knows what happened to Edgar Allan Poe during his final days but he was found delirious and incoherent in Baltimore – on a park bench according to The Raven – before being taken to hospital where he died.

This film speculates on how Poe came to be in this state, building a thrilling back story about a serial killer into the mystery.

Poe’s (John Cusack) livelihood has become dependent on the income he receives for the scathing reviews he writes for The Baltimore Times. Still a genius wordsmith, his drinking habit and struggle for inspiration have combined to all but kill his literary career, and he finds himself in the local drinking den branding the clientele philistines for not recognising him or his great works.

When a mother and daughter are found dead in a locked room, Detective Emmet Fields (Luke Evans) recognises elements of the crime from Poe’s story The Murders in the Rue Morgue and becomes convinced that there is a link. He recruits Poe to help him with the investigation.

As another person is found dead in similarly gruesome circumstances, it becomes apparent that a serial killer is on the loose – who promptly begins playing a cat and mouse game with the investigative team.

When Poe’s love Emily (Alice Eve) goes missing, it’s a race against time to trace the killer and save her life…

It’s a rare Hollywood film these days that comes from an original screenplay and doesn’t depend on a source novel, comic book or previous version for its inspiration. And The Raven is just that, although that isn’t to say it doesn’t feel derivative.

It feels in part influenced by Guy Richie’s Sherlock Holmes; specifically there are parallels between Robert Downey Jr’s incarnation of the famous fictional detective and Cusack’s Poe, who is more than a little dysfunctional and slightly unhinged.

But The Raven also feels like the murder mystery-style flicks that were prevalent through the 90s (Kiss the Girls and Copycat for example). Ultimately, it’s an olde worlde gothic serial killer thriller that marries with the likes of Saw and David Fincher’s Se7en.

John Cusack is delightfully dotty, bringing an intoxicating mix of arrogance, eccentricity and humour to Poe; his curiously polished face lending him a strange yet fitting otherworldly quality – a triumph (presumably) for Cusack’s cosmetic surgeon.

There’s plenty here that’s ridiculous – they frequently miss catching the perpetrator by inches or seconds, but it’s excusable because of the homage the film pays to the campness of Hammer horror movies (lots of swooshing dark cloaks, low key lighting and misty locations) and the injection of wry humour Cusack eases into the film.

And while the big ‘reveal’ – where we discover the identity of the murderer – is an anticlimax, Cusack’s performance, Poe’s final moments and a great supporting cast help hold our interest.

The surprising thing about John Carter is that nobody has made a film about the character before. Having first appeared in print in 1912 in American author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Barsoom novel, A Princess of Mars, John Carter was the original superhero.

The film starts at the beginning of the John Carter saga, telling the story of how he came to Mars and found himself at the centre of political and racial tensions on the red planet, known as Barsoom by its inhabitants.

Plagued by conflict, the ravaged planet is dying, and the beautiful Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) is eager to find a resolution and save Barsoom. When war-weary American Civil War vet John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is transported unexpectedly from Arizona to Mars, it’s the catalyst for change that the princess has been looking for.

The difference in gravity gives Carter extraordinary super powers and he must decide how – and indeed, if – he should use them to help Princess Dejah, and in the process, get himself home. If that’s what he wants, of course…

Over the years, there have been talks first to turn the books into an animation, then Ray Harryhausen expressed an interest in turning the saga into a stop motion extravaganza. There was even a notion in more recent times that Tom Cruise might feature in a live action version. The main obstacle appears to have been the fact that technology was never advanced enough to do justice to the grand scale of the story… until now.

As you watch, you’ll be reminded of numerous movies that have come, gone and stuck around over the years. Everything from British fantasy Krull to Superman and Stars Wars, Blade Runner and Avatar to Cowboys and Aliens owes a debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ space adventure.

So has the wait to see this on the big screen been worth it? Yes and no. In its favour, it retains the feel of an old fashioned swashbuckling adventure (albeit one set in space), with its exploration of themes pertinent to the era in which it was first written, at the same time as making use of contemporary advances in technology. For example, it employs performance capture techniques to realise alien races and bring the story to spectacular big-screen life. In these ways, it’s a perfect blend of old and new.

But to its detriment, it has too much flab around its middle. It becomes disorganised and uses way too much exposition, which in turn becomes really wearing on our ability to remain emotionally invested in the characters and story. A great beginning and finale go some way towards making up for its lack of exciting structured set pieces but it is crying out for a series of scenes that make our journey through the film much more thrilling.

Taylor Kitsch, however, is good looking, buff, funny and charismatic in the lead and a wealth of acting talent including Mark Strong, Dominic West, Samantha Morton, James Purefoy and Willem Defoe in supporting roles lends gravitas to the film and should help to draw in audiences.

Go and see John Carter if you reckon it’s your cup of tea – it will most likely leave you anticipating the inevitable sequel.