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.

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.

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.

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.

At every step along the way Blood Done Sign My Name avoids the triumphalist tone of so many civil rights films. Not once do you get the impression that this is one of those “one act changed everything forever” stories. Instead it recognizes that the progression toward racial equality was—and remains—a two-step-forward, one-step-back proposition. It’s a good thing that we don’t get to the end of the film thinking that everything’s gonna be rosy. The strength of Stuart’s film lies not in legal ramifications but in human ramifications. These will keep you hooked through the two-plus hour running time, and will leave you feeling inspired and satisfied even if the last twenty minutes come off as rather perfunctory.