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 case you fail to notice during the closing credits of the film, it’s worth noting that this English-language film is the work of Madrid’s ILION Animation Studios—which may well account for the freshness of their work. The film is the inaugural production of the studio, which was a spinoff of Pyro, a computer games manufacturer. This is all the more remarkable as the film in no way feels inspired by (or aimed at leveraging) the games market. Too bad we can’t say the same for many of our mega-budget Hollywood films. I really look forward to more from ILION. I know: it’s European. But really… that’s okay! Most of us used to be, too.

Capitalism: A Love Story is classic Michael Moore… which is to say, this is not his best work. It is unevenly entertaining, hopelessly skewed, yell-at-the-screen infuriating (for a number of reasons), and yet still largely compelling, just like the vast majority of Moore’s films. As Jeff Walls noted in his review of the theatrical release, “there’s no denying [Moore] knows how to make his case in a strong and entertaining way.” The film is certainly worth seeing; but it only tells part of the story. If you like what you find here, take the next step. Get serious. And remember: Michael Moore is an entertainer at heart. And that, my dear friends, is why he (and the rest of us!) likes Wally Shawn.

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.

If this film was intended to make me feel like a compulsive liar—which, perhaps, I am; it’s hard to tell what the truth actually is after seeing this film—then Steven Soderbergh succeeded brilliantly. If the point was pretty much anything else at all… well, better luck next time. Just about everything connected with the film feels like a fabrication, artificial to the core. Still, it’s likely that this frothy concoction plays exactly as Soderbergh intended from the get-go. What The Informant! doesn’t offer much of, unfortunately, is any insight into the nature of truth, or truth-telling. Unless…

What many viewers may miss is the chance the movie provides for a glimpse into our own not-too-distant cultural past. In cultures that place far less value on leisure that ours does today, children have always represented a blessing styled as “a quiver full of arrows” by the Old Testament—but not because they are merely so many little bundles of joy. For most of human history, that blessing has been very utilitarian in nature: a means to a family’s livelihood, hands to work the fields. And history is rife with examples of parents who have simply run away because they find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of feeding them.

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.