Serenity

It is five hundred years in the future and humankind has been messing around in space - like that'll happen! No, really, there've been terrible wars and in their aftermath the space junk, Serenity, and its motley crew navigate the galaxies by the seat of their pants and scrounge a living in the black economy. Into this happy life of space buccaneering barge Simon (Maher) and his weird sister River (Glau), wanted by the powers that be for the secrets she has divined from the minds of others.

Adapted from his TV series, Firefly, Whedon has made a clever and really well-written spin on the sci-fi yarn. No matter that he'll be accused of riding on George Lucas's coat-tails, he's a better writer than Lucas, whose own space operas borrowed heavily, and superficially, from older mythologies.

The film benefits enormously from skills honed by Whedon in TV work - Roseanne, Buffy, Angel, Firely - and the characters come to the big screen already fully formed. It profits greatly from there being no 'stars' in the picture, so the characters all have an equal importance. Who knows which of them may die. Already the makings of a cult phenomenon, Serenity has Hollywood 'franchise' written all over it. Within days of its US opening it had gone to no. 118 in the IMDB all-time top 250. See it while it's fresh.