Jay Baruchel

"We storm the ranch, or we die trying!" Who doesn't want to like a jokey road movie about a band of Star Wars nerds breaking into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch to steal a print of Episode I ? Set in the fall of 1998 - six months before the release of the fabled Phantom Menace (seems like ancient history) - Kyle Newman's slapdash feature boasts cameos from Star Wars alums Carrie Fisher and Billy Dee Williams, along with Danny McBride, Seth Rogen (in dual roles as a Star Trek geek and a Las Vegas pimp)

Green Zone . 1/2 (Universal Pictures, '10) $29.98. 115 mins. A U.S. Army officer questions his country's mission when his hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq reveals covert intelligence. With Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla. R (violence and profanity) The Last Station . 1/2 (Sony Pictures Classics, '09) $27.96. 112 mins. The declining health of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who denounces material wealth, leads to a battle between his wife and a chief follower over his fortune.

"THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE" DVD is made with fans in mind. If you select the commentary feature, for instance, you don't get input from some dweeby writer or director - you get Rob Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and series author Stephenie Meyer. There is also a photo gallery with plenty of Edward and Jacob beefcake, a six-part behind-the-scenes documentary, music videos of the film's songs, and the usual extended and deleted scenes. Those who've outgrown "Twilight" might consider "Knight and Day," but only if desperate.

WHILE 2010 WASN'T the watershed year for animation that 2009 was, there were some pleasant surprises, like "How to Train Your Dragon. " It's the winning story of a puny medieval Viking boy (Jay Baruchel) who is courageous enough to befriend one of the dragons that makes periodic raids on his homeland. He nurses the downed and injured creature back to health, and comes to understand that humans and dragons can coexist, an idea he must sell to his warlike community. The movie is lively and funny, and the title character - a sleek, black dragon with an almost space-age feel to it - is a triumph of design and animation.

There's a bit of Pandora in the piney mountainscapes of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon, and more than a bit of the Na'avi, too, in the swooping aerial sequences involving this kid-friendly picture's hero and heroine: There they go, straddling a giant winged beast and spiraling through the misty skies. Add a pair of 3-D glasses - How to Train Your Dragon is being presented in the pricier stereoscopic format in almost half the theaters where it's booked - and at times it seems that this lively, colorful animated fantasy comes by way of James Cameron.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Queen Latifah; Justin Bieber performs. Dr. Phil (5 p.m., CBS3) - Parenting children with behavorial disorders. Losing It With Jillian (8 p.m., NBC10) - Jillian visits Huntington Woods, Mich., to help parents Amy and Todd Franklin, who have been overweight most of their lives. After undergoing gastric bypass surgery, Amy lost 100 pounds but since then has regained half of that, while Todd secretly snacks compulsively, alarming his two daughters.

Comedies often rely on odd-couple asymmetry. The skinny guy and the fat one. The blonde and the brunette. The neatnik and the slob. She's Out of My League , a raunchy comedy with a surprisingly deep vein of sweetness, mines - as the ballad goes - a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme. Not beauty and beast, exactly, but babe and dweeb. It's a disparity purveyed by movies as diverse as Knocked Up and The Hottie and the Nottie , and the cheerfully vulgar (but with heart)

SAN FRANCISCO - It might seem odd to make a live-action feature film based on a Mickey Mouse character from the 1940s. But that's what actor Nicolas Cage and director Jon Turtletaub have done with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice. " The film is based on the animated segment of the same name from the Disney classic "Fantasia. " In the segment, one of eight shorts set to classical music, Mickey Mouse is the eager assistant to magician Yen Sid. After being assigned housework, Mickey tries using magic to take care of the tasks.

THE TITLE creature in "How to Train Your Dragon" is an object lesson in how to entrance a young audience with animation. The movie itself is a pleasant time killer with a stock story and characters, but its dragon is a triumph of conception and design - part beast and part Stealth bomber. Sleek, black, medieval in origin, space-age in design and movement (best seen in 3-D). It's wounded and then befriended by a Viking boy named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), who's been raised by his warlike father (Gerard Butler)

Jokes within jokes. Movies within movies. A reel suicide mission that turns into a real one. Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder is raunchy, raucous and riotously funny. But so acutely self-conscious that the effect is one of a stand-up comedian furnishing color commentary on his own act. Written by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, the movie about the making of a Vietnam War movie called Tropic Thunder is a self-mocking comedy tweaking showbiz self-importance. And an action flick chronicling a studio's bungle in the jungle.

"THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE" DVD is made with fans in mind. If you select the commentary feature, for instance, you don't get input from some dweeby writer or director - you get Rob Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and series author Stephenie Meyer. There is also a photo gallery with plenty of Edward and Jacob beefcake, a six-part behind-the-scenes documentary, music videos of the film's songs, and the usual extended and deleted scenes. Those who've outgrown "Twilight" might consider "Knight and Day," but only if desperate.

WHILE 2010 WASN'T the watershed year for animation that 2009 was, there were some pleasant surprises, like "How to Train Your Dragon. " It's the winning story of a puny medieval Viking boy (Jay Baruchel) who is courageous enough to befriend one of the dragons that makes periodic raids on his homeland. He nurses the downed and injured creature back to health, and comes to understand that humans and dragons can coexist, an idea he must sell to his warlike community. The movie is lively and funny, and the title character - a sleek, black dragon with an almost space-age feel to it - is a triumph of design and animation.

THE SUMMER OF '10 may be remembered as the season Jerry Bruckheimer lost his Midas touch. I long ago ceased to question Bruckheimer's uncanny sense of audience taste - I gazed uncomprehendingly at sequels to "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "National Treasure," and was just as dumbfounded by their cumulative box office (a billion or two). Lately, though, his gift for turning leaden scripts into gold seems to have deserted him - "Prince of Persia," though a much less awful film than "National Treasure 2," is a certifiable bomb.

SAN FRANCISCO - It might seem odd to make a live-action feature film based on a Mickey Mouse character from the 1940s. But that's what actor Nicolas Cage and director Jon Turtletaub have done with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice. " The film is based on the animated segment of the same name from the Disney classic "Fantasia. " In the segment, one of eight shorts set to classical music, Mickey Mouse is the eager assistant to magician Yen Sid. After being assigned housework, Mickey tries using magic to take care of the tasks.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Queen Latifah; Justin Bieber performs. Dr. Phil (5 p.m., CBS3) - Parenting children with behavorial disorders. Losing It With Jillian (8 p.m., NBC10) - Jillian visits Huntington Woods, Mich., to help parents Amy and Todd Franklin, who have been overweight most of their lives. After undergoing gastric bypass surgery, Amy lost 100 pounds but since then has regained half of that, while Todd secretly snacks compulsively, alarming his two daughters.

Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer whose films include National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean , has a formula. It goes something like this. Take a mainstream script - the hunt for missing treasure, say - and cast it with an off-center actor to give the marshmallow some texture and edge. So it is with The Sorcerer's Apprentice , a hearty helping of movie comfort food, the seventh collaboration between Bruckheimer and Mr. Live From Off-Center himself, Nicolas Cage.

Green Zone . 1/2 (Universal Pictures, '10) $29.98. 115 mins. A U.S. Army officer questions his country's mission when his hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq reveals covert intelligence. With Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla. R (violence and profanity) The Last Station . 1/2 (Sony Pictures Classics, '09) $27.96. 112 mins. The declining health of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who denounces material wealth, leads to a battle between his wife and a chief follower over his fortune.

There's a bit of Pandora in the piney mountainscapes of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon, and more than a bit of the Na'avi, too, in the swooping aerial sequences involving this kid-friendly picture's hero and heroine: There they go, straddling a giant winged beast and spiraling through the misty skies. Add a pair of 3-D glasses - How to Train Your Dragon is being presented in the pricier stereoscopic format in almost half the theaters where it's booked - and at times it seems that this lively, colorful animated fantasy comes by way of James Cameron.

There's a bit of Pandora in the piney mountainscapes of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon , and more than a bit of the Na'avi, too, in the swooping aerial sequences involving this kid-friendly picture's hero and heroine: There they go, straddling a giant winged beast and spiraling through the misty skies. Add a pair of 3-D glasses - How to Train Your Dragon is being presented in the pricier stereoscopic format in almost half the theaters where it's booked - and at times it seems that this lively, colorful animated fantasy comes by way of James Cameron.