The long-threatened Avengers Assemble (in the US simply The Avengers) is an appositely extravagant big screen adaptation of the Marvel comic book sensation. More importantly for many, it’s an amalgam of several superhero film franchises, making it a great excuse to pile star upon star. Written and directed by cult favourite Joss Whedon, it really is a fanboy’s dream. Perhaps you’re relishing the prospect already, but even those for whom it sounds like a load of “crash, bang, wallops” may find themselves pleasantly surprised.

Incest, rape, torture and matricide, as well as an obligatory spot of cross-dressing, all played their part in making Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk the scandalous success of its day. But with such stuff the bread and butter of Hollywood’s unblinking horror departments, why would a contemporary director choose to revisit this period classic? It was apparently a lifelong ambition of Surrealism’s greatest filmmaker Luis Buñuel to adapt The Monk for the screen.

Remember when the movies used to celebrate sex, be it Julie Christie diving under the table to service Warren Beatty in Shampoo or Kathleen Turner selling the sizzle in Body Heat? No longer. These days, celluloid sex is a soulless, dispiriting affair even when the bodies on view are beauts. And so it is that hot on the heels of Michael Fassbender's descent into the carnal abyss in Shame comes Juliette Binoche in the Franco-German-Polish collaboration Elles, a film that makes notably heavy weather of the heavy breathing with which it begins.

This one sounds like a hard sell: a muted, taciturn, cautious film from Austria about a friendless boy in a young offenders’ institution who takes a job working for the municipal undertakers. Breathing (original title: Atmen) would appear at first glance modest in scope and gloomy in outlook. But whatever the odds stacked against it, this quiet, observational debut from Karl Markovics turns out to pack a discreetly powerful punch.

Footage of wiry East African men and women breaking the tape in marathons and distance track-events is now more or less synonymous with the highest achievements in top-level sport, and it won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve lived through more than a couple of cycles of the Olympic Games to be reminded that the medal-winners in the long-distance running events are no longer, generally speaking, from “round here”.

In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown.

Getting on for three decades ago Lasse Hallström was introduced to audiences outside his native Sweden with My Life As a Dog. An emotionally continent, directorially restrained picture of the pains and pleasures of a rural childhood, it was Hallström’s ticket to Hollywood. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, featuring a coltish young Leonardo di Caprio, retained some of Hallström’s snappy weirdness when he moved into English, since when he has wandered into the mainstream and can’t seem to locate the exit.

"Find your inner soldier and stop the alien threat before it's too late!" runs the blurb for Hasbro's Battleship computer game. The movie of the game seizes this basic idea by the scruff of the neck, and pumps it up into a cacophonous effects-crammed military yarn with a deafening heavy metal soundtrack. Alien forces have landed in the Pacific, and the US Navy is forced to fight Pearl Harbor II.

The Gospel of Us is a film about remembering. It is based on and was filmed at The Passion of Port Talbot, Michael Sheen’s triumphant theatre-event that took over his home town in south Wales to retell the Easter story this time last year. Writer Owen Sheers has novelised The Passion as The Gospel of Us.

Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer.