Is there anything in it for people who aren’t dedicated fans?

Clank, smash, explosion. It’s the third time out for America’s louchest superhero.

After six films worth of buildup, The Avengers contains something to entertain the comic book collector as well as the contemporary Hollywood fan boy.

Two movies open tomorrow featuring British men with a fundamental and crippling fear of being alone. Both have extremely strong bonds to the men in their lives. When those men disappear, they are left alone with their worst inclinations. The two have very different coping mechanisms. For one, the answer is suicide. For the other, it is to commit enough mischief and calculated manipulation to bring his wayward partner back into his orbit. For…

First things first. Let’s get this whole controversy bit out of the way. Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire, Tropic Thunder, has drawn the ire of a number of groups representing the mentally disabled. The offense is taken at a plot point which has Stiller’s Tugg Speedman, an action hero desperate to be taken seriously, playing a character in the mold of Sean Penn’s in I Am Sam. Speedman’s performance in this past role is a…

Comic books are big business. Hell, they’re doing so well that they’re giving the things away. The king of the comic business, Marvel, is so flush that they decided that instead of letting big movie studios buy the rights to their stories, they’d expand the movie arm of their operation into a full-fledged studio and just make them on their own. And if anyone doubted the studio’s ability to make that leap, their first effort,…