Rip Van Winkle’s got nothing on John Carter, a Civil War vet who falls asleep in an Arizona cave in 1868 and awakens in an arid wasteland in which he finds himself able to jump half a mile into the sky and bound effortlessly across the plains. “Where on earth am I?” Carter wonders. It’s called Mars — or, as the natives say, Barsoom.

Tuesday, March 13 — Mismatched cop comedies are certainly nothing new, but leave it to writer-director John Michael McDonagh to put a bit of Irish spring into an all-too-familiar concept.

“What do you do in the basement?” asks Jeff’s puzzled mom, Sharon (Susan Sarandon). “You’re not cleaning it.” “Do you really want to know?” Jeff (Jason Segel) answers. “You didn’t like the last time we had this conversation.” That’s not so surprising since the 30-year-old Jeff is a pothead, an M. Night Shyamalan fan and one of those “failure to launch” cases that never got his act together and took it on the road. Consequently, he remains “Jeff, Who Lives at Home.”

What the world probably doesn’t need right now is one more big-screen adaptation of an all-but-forgotten TV series. Another buddy-cop flick? Yeah, we could get along just fine without that, too. But “21 Jump Street” qualifies as a happy surprise, a bad idea that turns out to be an often uproariously funny movie.

What if they held a Hunger Games pageant and nobody watched? That's the question posed by Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), a young man who stands a strong chance of being recruited for the annual ritual held in the futuristic republic of Panem. His friend, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), laughs at the thought of people tuning out on the Hunger Games because if you're a citizen of Panem, you're expected to be glued to your TV.

Friday, March 30 — While there was Happy, Sneezy, Bashful and Dopey, the retinue of dwarfs in Disney’s “Snow White” did not include Snarky. Screenwriters Marc Klein and Jason Keller remedy that in “Mirror Mirror,” an attempt to rewrite Snow’s tale from the perspective of her tormenter, the power-mad queen, played with admirable comic zest by a hammily haughty Julia Roberts. Despite the title, the movie has no relation to Gregory Maguire’s compelling 2003 novel, which also tweaked and twisted the Brothers Grimm story; this “Mirror” seems to reflect the influences of “Shrek,” Drew Barrymore’s “Ever After” and, particularly when Roberts is around, “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Wednesday, April 4 -- "Good evening, everyone, and thanks for coming down to the Olympus Lounge tonight. Our special cocktail tonight is the Saganaki Sour, made with ouzo, bitters and the finest flaming cheese that money can buy. And this next little number is for lovers only, and it's called 'Ode on a Grecian Error.' It goes a little something like this: "I went to 'Wrath of the Titans'/But it was so lame/I had to laugh at the Titans/Ain't that a shame/Everyone was attackin'/But there was no Kraken to blame …"

When I was a kid, the Three Stooges were taboo; my mother banned them from our house because their brand of eye-poking, head-slapping, stomach-punching horseplay was exactly the sort of roughhousing she dreaded seeing in the living room or the backyard. She also deep-sixed The Monkees as well, perhaps because she didn’t want her children to fall under the spell of Don Kirshner and start a boy-band.

In improvisational comedy workshops, there’s a two-person game called “Get the Donut,” in which one performer plays a hungry customer trying to buy a particular pastry and the other plays a bakery cashier who has to think up obstacles and distractions to prevent the purchase. The same set-up is used in Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel’s screenplay for “The Five-Year Engagement,” an often bittersweet romance about the pain of putting your dreams on hold. How much you enjoy the movie will depend on your tolerance for the escalating-frustration school of comedy, in which nice people with simple plans end up stuck in a labyrinth of unforeseen complications.

Wednesday, May 2 — Do you want to see “The Avengers”? No, not that ill-fated Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman/Sean Connery sci-fi-spy mess from many summers ago — we’re talking about the Marvel Comics superhero mash-up that’s right up there with “The Dark Knight Rises” and director Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” as one of the year’s most-anticipated movies.