Captain America: The First Avenger 3D – review

Chris Evans as comic superhero Captain America: 'deadly dull'.

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes," says someone in Brecht's Life of Galileo, to which Galileo replies: "No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes!" Make that superheroes and I'd say: "Hear, hear." Hollywood, working with Marvel Comics, is currently giving us a surfeit of these caped crusaders with camp costumes and special powers, the latest being the deadly dull Captain America, originally created as a comic book figure in 1941.

Captain America: The First AvengerProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 124 minsDirectors: Joe JohnstonCast: Chris Evans, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Natalie Dormer, Richard Armitage, Sebastian Stan, Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee JonesMore on this film

He's a 90lb weakling turned into a powerful democratic protagonist by a German emigre scientist (Stanley Tucci) as the US enters the second world war. He has an opposite number in Hitler's Nazi superhero, Red Skull, a Teutonic villain with a strong physical resemblance to Harry Potter's nemesis, Voldemort. There are borrowings from the superior Raiders of the Lost Ark (for which Captain America's director won a visual effects Oscar) and it's altogether inferior to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It ends, depressingly, with a trailer for a sequel due next May.

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First look at Scorsese's Hugo

He just couldn't hold out any longer. Martin Scorsese, the prince of urban squalor, male neurosis and – just occasionally – transcendent spirituality, has finally succumbed, and gone all Harry Potter.

HugoProduction year: 2011Countries: France, USA Directors: Martin ScorseseCast: Ben Kingsley, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Helen McCrory, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Sacha Baron CohenMore on this film

At least, that's what the trailer for his new film Hugo suggests. Steam trains, mechanical contraptions, winsome kids in 1940s short trousers: it's all there. In fact, little Chloe Moretz repeats what was clearly the movie's pitch line about two-thirds of the way through: "It's Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one."

Can Scorsese do justice to Brian Selznick's award-winning book? Does he have the family-friendly instincts that will mean he can push the right buttons, a la his compatriot Steven Spielberg? And is Sacha Baron Cohen hurtling into a wedding cake actually all that funny? What do you think?

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