Legend has it that for early test screenings of the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas substituted footage of World War II aerial dogfights in place of the not-yet-completed sequences pitting the Rebel Alliance's X-Wings against the Empire's fleet of TIE fighters. Now, three decades later, Lucas has made a full-fledged World War II movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the celebrated squadron of African-American fighter pilots who defied the prejudice of the times and flew a number of crucial missions in the European theater of the war.

The new movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon is a romantic circus epic, three words I don't often like to say together. Like Titanic under the big top, or Larger Than Life during the Great Depression, the movie manages to combine star-crossed lovers and economic disparity with comedically unruly animals, and the end result is a sappy, clichéd, albeit very pretty, film. And since it takes place during Prohibition, everyone in the movie drinks, be it whiskey, cheap moonshine or champagne, and by the end of the movie, I was kind of jealous. Why should they get to drift through two hours of melodrama in a foggy haze while I have to sit there soberly and see every twist and turn coming a mile away? (And I hadn't even read the book.) If you want to be constantly surprised by this movie, I recommend making a drinking game out of it. Here are the players, and the rules.

Did you know that John Wilkes Booth didn't act alone? That even as he shot Abraham Lincoln, he had accomplices making their own unsuccessful strikes on the Vice President and the Secretary of State? You didn't? Well, now you do. So, unless you want to learn more about what a kangaroo court looked like in 1865, or how bitter things were between Northerners and Southerners in the dwindling days of the Civil War, there's really no other reason to see The Conspirator. Unless, of course, you need yet another object lesson about how no matter the progress we make, history tends to repeat itself.

After breaking out in Rome, Ray Stevenson played thugs in a slew of bad movies, from Punisher: War Zone to Cirque du Freak to The Book of Eli. He'll elevate his tough-guy game slightly in Thor and The Three Musketeers later this year, but anyone looking to see him step outside his goon-shaped box would do well to check out Kill the Irishman. The real-life character he plays is still basically a thug, but he's an intelligent, quirky thug with a fabulous mustache, and he holds his own against a huge cast of some of our greatest crime-movie actors. The film itself isn't great art, but it's a fun way to learn about a little-known period in our history, with a lot of explosions in it.

When two films come out on the same subject at around the same time, there's usually a clear victor. And although it came out several months ago, and very few people saw it, I have to give the "Best Romans fighting Picts north of Hadrian's Wall Movie" award to Centurion. The Neil Marshall-directed movie starred Michael Fassbender and was a tense action-thriller full of scenic highland chases. Kevin MacDonald's The Eagle is also a tense action-thriller, but it stars Channing Tatum, and while he's believable as an American soldier in... well, every movie he makes, he's less believable as the commander of a Roman legion. Not even giving all the other Romans American accents can cover up the fact that the man's not a terribly dynamic actor. That said, the movie is entertaining, and even occasionally humorous (both intentionally and unintentionally), and you'll definitely never look at Billy Elliot the same way ever again.

Today is Nicolas Cage's birthday. It's also the day the first mainstream release of 2011 comes out, which just so happens to be Cage's first attempt at playing a character who didn't live during the industrial age. Fans of Cage's famous (on-screen) freak-outs will probably cackle with glee at the thought of him throwing one in a castle courtyard (think Ray Liotta as a wizard in In the Name of the King), but I'm happy to see his overly serious delivery placed in a context where it actually makes sense, something we got to see a little bit of in last year's Sorcerer's Apprentice. Granted, serious Cage isn't as fun as manic Cage, but in Season of the Witch, he gets to act noble in a time when nobility actually meant something, and it's okay for him to act holier-than-thou when he has a big fricking cross on his chest. He probably should have done one of these movies years ago, because Season is better than a significant portion of his recent output. That's not saying much, but it certainly says something.

Nicolas Cage may be the star of the new medieval action-horror movie Season of the Witch, but he wouldn't last through the opening credits without his wingman, played by Ron Perlman. As a pair of Crusaders escorting a witch to trial through plague-infested Europe, Cage and Perlman's characters make great use of their shared history as soldiers, and Perlman steals his scenes with his wit and charm. We talked exclusively to the Sons of Anarchy and Hellboy star about the role, his co-stars, and what's next for him as Clay Morrow and as Hellboy himself.

The King's Speech was the first movie in a long time that I've gone into without seeing a trailer for in advance. I figured, "The buzz is great, the actors are great, the director is great, so why bother?" So, despite having actually attended speech therapy sessions with a family member, I wasn't sure how the thrilling story of a king learning to cure his stutter was going to play out. It turns out it plays out very much like Rocky, or Days of Thunder, or any other sports movie where an underdog, through commitment and dedication, becomes a champion, only in this case they're a champion at reading good.

Darth Vader. Ernst Blofeld. Voldemort. Great cinematic villains, all, and I wish Scooter Libby was joining them, if only for the hilarity of having a villain named "Scooter" ranked among the greatest of all time. Unfortunately, the man behind the chaos unleashed in Fair Game is barely seen, usually only walking into a room, asking some leading questions and smirking a lot. (Luckily, actor David Andrews gives great smirk.) Still, Libby sets in chain a series of events that leads to at least one CIA mission being compromised, and more than one person getting killed. But his worst crime? Putting strain on a marriage, if this movie is any indication.

As far as titles go, "Fair Game" is pretty generic, and it's been used for a variety of films over the years, from a romantic comedy to an Australian movie about poaching to, most famously, the action-film debut of one Cindy Crawford, famous supermodel and terrible actress. The latest Fair Game is a political movie about the Valerie Plame affair, and while the name comes from Plame's own autobiography, we can't help thinking about Crawford and William Baldwin running away from explosions in tank-tops every time we hear it. One would think the new movie would suffer from sharing a name with a film that almost won three Razzies (fortunately, Showgirls also came out that year), but it might benefit from the association, because while the two films don't seem to have that much in common, this one looks like it could use a little bit of what the old movie had in spades: sex, violence and debatably witty banter. Let's see how the two stack up.