DVD REVIEWS

THE AVENGERS

★★★ 1/2 (out of four)

You don’t have to sport a propeller beanie to enjoy The Aveng

ers, which may be the highest possible praise for what director Joss Whedon and co-writer Zak Penn have wrought in their energizing superhero adventure.

Whether you love or merely like The Avengers will likely come down to the performances of the ensemble, and not the perfunctory plot or the on-the-fly back story. And what an ensemble it is. Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury, the director of a global peacekeeping agency composed of a fistful of Marvel Comics superheroes that include Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and newcomer to the team the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a lethal gymnast.

They’re summoned to join together to fight the threat posed by Thor’s angry adoptive brother, who is in cahoots with a reptilian alien race called Chitauri.

But it’s not until the last half hour of the film, when all are enjoined for a battle that could easily be called Transformers

Take Manhattan, that Whedon’s carefully developed characters take flight as a team.

It’s quite the payoff, although it would be better if the villains were as good as the heroes.

Extras include a director’s commentary, extended/alternate/ deleted scenes, making-of featurettes and a gag reel.

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

★★ 1/2

Whit Stillman’s screwball college comedy Damsels in Distress is only the fourth film in his 22-year career and his first since The Last Days of Disco in 1998. Perhaps he needs all that time to write and store up the amusing aphorisms that issue from the mouths of his creations.

He reserves his best bon mots for lead damsel Violet (Greta Gerwig), who leads a quartet of do-gooders determined to help people improve themselves, even if it kills them.

“There’s enough material here for a lifetime of social work,” Violet sighs, looking around her at all the moody girls and moronic boys who have alarmingly shot up the campus suicide rate.

Campus newspaper editor Rick DeWolfe (Zach Woods) and Violet share a brisk exchange about who’s in the know about what’s really going down. But the two hardly cross paths after this, and the loss is felt.

Instead, Stillman pairs Violet with the terminally dense Frank (Ryan Metcalf ), who causes female hearts to race but who barely seems to possess a single functioning brain cell.

Fortunately, Damsels has an abundance of the erudite zingers that Stillman excels at writing, and that make his works seem like period pieces, even though they’re set in modern times.

Extras include a director and cast commentary, plus making-of featurettes.