After playing supporting roles in hit comedies like Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder, Jay Baruchel finally gets his time in the spotlight this March in both live-action and animation. At the end of the month, Baruchel will voice the lead character in How to Train Your Dragon, but first he stars in She’s Out of My League as the average, nerdy guy who somehow wins the heart of the hot girl. At least, I think he does. I just saw the movie and I’ve pretty much forgotten about it already.

Green Zone is a new Iraq war thriller that couldn’t have planned its release date any better. Being released wide on March 12th, the movie hits theaters just five days after another Iraq war movie, The Hurt Locker, took home the Oscar for Best Picture. The movie’s marketing team, however, has taken a different tack. They are focusing on the collaboration between director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, whose two previous collaborations resulted in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, two of the best and most popular action movies in the past decade. Whereas those movies were pure entertainment, however, Green Zone has a decidedly more political agenda. And I find it to be the best American movie released so far this year

The French drama Un prophete, or A Prophet, is now arriving in the United States after already taking the rest of the world by storm. An Oscar nominee for best foreign language film, A Prophet has already earned that prize at the British Academy Awards, following its Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The American trailer for the film opens with a quote from the London Times calling it “as epic as The Godfather. A must see.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. I do hope it is able to find an audience here in the States. It certainly deserves one.

In 2001, Antoine Fuqua directed Ethan Hawke to an Oscar nomination in the down-and-dirty cop drama Training Day. Now, the two are reuniting for Brooklyn’s Finest, another gritty cop drama, but this time with far poorer results. There is not a single original character or idea in Brooklyn’s Finest and the result had the preview audience complaining of those two-plus hours they will never get back.

Director Tim Burton teams up with star Johnny Depp and wife Helena Bonham Carter for the seventh and sixth time, respectively, for this most recent adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel and its sequel. The film is being released by Disney, the studio who previously adapted Carroll’s stories in 1951. But Burton and screenwriter Linda Wolverton are bringing a slightly different take with their new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, as they have Alice is returning to Wonderland years after her first visit. It’s like what Spielberg did in Hook, only with much better results.

Director Roman Polanski has been in the news a lot recently, but not for his filmmaking. Still wanted in the United States for a 1977 sexual assault case, Polanski was recently arrested in Europe and will likely have to travel back to the U.S. for sentencing. Sounds like the guy could use a distraction and a hit movie may be just what he needs. But The Ghost Writer moves slowly and the end reveal is not nearly mind-blowing enough to make it worth the monotony. It’s a nice effort that certainly harkens back to the paranoid thrillers of the seventies, but it is not nearly as successful as, say, Michael Clayton. Sorry, Jake, this is not Chinatown.

George A Romero’s name has become synonymous with zombies, so it comes as no surprise that, in this era of fondness for both the undead and remakes, his canon of work is being mined. Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead is one of the better of the recent zombie movies and helped usher in the era of the modern, fast-moving zombie. Now, director Breck Eisner is remaking Romero’s 1973 flick The Crazies and while it is no Dawn of the Dead, it is sure to delight fans of the genre.

Long considered to be overlooked, legendary director Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar for directing his exciting 2006 cops-and-robbers flick The Departed. For his next narrative feature, Scorsese reunites with star Leonardo DiCaprio for the fourth time to make Shutter Island, a puzzling thriller based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. Previously set to be released last October, the movie now hopes to take advantage of the notoriously lightweight month of February. On a first viewing, however, I must say that the film is rather underwhelming. There is little about this movie that suggests “A Martin Scorsese Picture” and I’ll bet in time only his biggest fans will be giving it that second look.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the new movie Valentine’s Day is the lengthy opening credits. As the movie alphabetically lists one-by-one the names of its stars, one cannot help but be impressed at the sheer volume of popular talent. It appears director Garry Marshall collected just about every attractive person in Hollywood and threw them together in a romantic comedy blender. Some, it turns out, have rather small roles in the film, whereas others may take up a little too much of the movie’s runtime.

The filmmakers behind Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief can talk all they want about keeping Percy unique from its predecessor Harry Potter, but the similarities are too prominent to be ignored. Adding to the comparison is the fact that Lightning Thief is directed by Chris Columbus, the same man who directed the first two Potter films. Still, with the Harry Potter series about to wrap and the vast world of Greek Mythology to explore, Percy Jackson might just be poised to take over the reins from Hollywood’s most beloved series.