While racing in Monaco, Stark is attacked by Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), who has constructed a miniaturized arc reactor of his own, including whip-like attachments harnessing the electrical energy. Defeating Vanko with the aid of his Mark V armor (a transforming briefcase), Stark discovers that Vanko is the son of disgraced Russian physicist Anton Vanko, who collaborated on the first arc reactor with Stark’s father Howard (John Slattery). Vanko is promptly broken out of jail by a revenge-seeking Justin Hammer, who puts him to work fashioning a line of “Iron Drones” that he will use to upstage Stark at his own Expo.

Tony throws what he believes will be his last birthday party and promptly proceeds to get drunk whilst wearing the Iron Man armor, forcing his friend Lt. Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) to don the Mark II armor and subdue him. Disgraced, Stark is approached by Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D (Samuel L. Jackson), who provides him with a chest of his father’s old artifacts that can hopefully be used to find a cure for his palladium poisoning. Reviewing the film reels in the chest, Stark discovers a message from his father that leads him to the original 1974 diorama of the Stark Expo: in reality, a disguised diagram for the atomic structure of a new element. Stark hand-builds a particle accelerator with the aid of his computer J.A.R.V.I.S. (voiced by Paul Bettany) and synthesizes this new element, creating a new triangular chest arc that cures his poisoning.

Simultaneously, at Stark Expo, Hammer unveils his new military drones, captained by Rhodes in a heavily-weaponized version of the confiscated Mark II armor. Unfortunately, it is soon discovered that Vanko has complete control of both the drones and Rhodes’s new armor, and Stark arrives just as they go on the attack. As Stark battles against these remote-controlled enemies, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Natalie (an undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Natasha Romanoff) race to Hammer’s Queens facility to stop Vanko. By the time they arrive, Vanko has already departed for the Expo in a new, more powerful suit of armor, but Natalie is able to give Rhodes control of his armor again so that he and Stark can fight Vanko together. The two armored allies combine their powers and successfully take Vanko down, but his armor and drones are revealed to have been equipped with self-destruct charges. As they begin to go off, Stark races to save Pepper, rescuing her at the last minute.After landing on a roof she quits her CEO position, and she finally gives Tony a kiss, to which they both find Rhodes sitting a few meters away. He then claims he was there first so they should get their own roof after Stark tries to defend himself.

At a debriefing, Fury informs Stark that while Stark is “unsuitable” for the “Avengers Initiative”, S.H.I.E.L.D. wants Iron Man as a consultant. Stark agrees on the condition that Senator Stern present him and Col. Rhodes with their medals for bravery.

In a post-credits scene, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) is seen driving to a remote impact crater in the New Mexico desert. As he informs Fury over the phone that they’ve “found it”, the crater is shown to contain Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor.

Jesse is apprehended by the police under suspicion of murdering Kris, and is killed by Freddy when he falls asleep in his jail cell. With her friends dying, Nancy begins to question what everyone’s connection is to each other, given that none of them can remember each other before their teenage years. Eventually, Nancy and her friend Quentin Smith (Kyle Gallner) discover that all of them, including more children, attended the same preschool together. Nancy’s mother Gwen (Connie Britton) reluctantly tells Nancy and Quentin that there was a gardener at the preschool, Fred Krueger, who hurt Nancy and the rest of the kids. Gwen explains that Nancy was his favorite, and came home one day telling her mom about Freddy’s “magic cave” and the things that happened down there. Gwen claims Krueger skipped town before he was arrested. Nancy does not believe her and attempts to track down the remaining kids from the school. Nancy eventually discovers that all of the other kids have been killed, most of them in their sleep. Meanwhile, Quentin tries to accept that everything is nothing more than repressed memories, but he falls asleep during swim practice and witnesses what really happened to Krueger. Quentin sees everyone’s parents hunt down Krueger, and then burn him alive. Quentin and Nancy confront Quentin’s father, Alan Smith (Clancy Brown), about the reality they murdered Krueger with no actual evidence that he had committed any crime. Nancy and Quentin, who both begin sporadically dreaming while they are awake as a result of insomnia, decide to go to the preschool and learn what they can about Krueger.

On the way, Nancy falls asleep and is attacked by Freddy, but when Quentin wakes her up they discover she has pulled a piece of Freddy’s sweater out of the dreamworld and into reality. Quentin takes Nancy to the hospital for cuts on her arm; there, he steals some adrenaline and a syringe to help them stay awake. Nancy and Quentin leave the hospital and eventually make it to the preschool. Quentin uncovers Krueger’s “magic cave” and the evidence that proves Krueger was physically and sexually abusing all of the children. Nancy decides the only way to end this is to pull Krueger out of their dreams and kill him in reality. Quentin tries to stay awake long enough to pull Nancy out of her dream when she has Freddy, but he falls asleep and is attacked. Krueger then goes after Nancy, and explains that he intentionally left her for last so she would stay awake long enough that when she finally fell asleep, she would no longer be able to wake back up. While Nancy struggles with Freddy, Quentin wakes and uses the adrenaline to bring Nancy up and pull Freddy into reality. With Krueger distracted by Quentin, Nancy uses a broken paper cutter blade to cut Freddy’s gloved hand off, and then slice his throat. Afterward, Nancy torches the secret room, with Krueger’s body left inside, while she and Quentin leave. Nancy and her mother return home from the hospital, with Nancy being told she should get some sleep. Krueger suddenly appears in a mirror’s reflection and kills Nancy’s mother before pulling her body through the mirror while Nancy screams.

A fisherman named Spyros (Pete Postlethwaite) finds a coffin adrift in the sea, discovering a baby, Perseus, and his dead mother, Danaë (Tine Stapelfeldt), inside. Spyros decides to raise Perseus as his own. Years later, Perseus (Sam Worthington) and his family are fishing when they witness a group of soldiers from Argos destroying a statue of Zeus as a declaration of war against the gods. Hades appears and commands harpies to massacre the soldiers before he himself destroys Perseus’s family’s fishing boat. Perseus tries to save his family, but to no avail.

The surviving soldiers take Perseus back to Argos. During a feast for the returning soldiers King Kepheus (Vincent Regan) and Queen Cassiopeia (Polly Walker and Katherine Loeppky) of Argos compare themselves and their daughter, Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), to the gods, much to their daughter’s dismay. After convincing his brother to let him loose on humanity to punish Argos for its hubris, Hades appears in the courtroom before killing the remaining soldiers while Perseus is unaffected. Revealing Perseus to be the demigod son of Zeus, and aging Cassiopeia to death, Hades threatens that if Princess Andromeda is not sacrificed to the Kraken, Argos will be destroyed in 10 days. Hermes (Alexander Siddig), the messenger god, approaches Zeus on Olympus, revealing the location of his son Perseus. Hermes suggests offering Perseus sanctuary, but Zeus declares that he shall be left to his fate, along with the other infidel mortals.

The king seeks the help of Perseus after he is placed in the dungeon. Perseus refuses until he meets Io (Gemma Arterton), a woman who does not age as punishment for refusing to be seduced by a god. Io reveals that Perseus’ conception was a punishment conducted by Zeus on Acrisius (Jason Flemyng), the former king of Argos who was married to Danaë, for his actions against the gods. When Acrisius set Danaë and the baby Perseus adrift in their coffin, an enraged Zeus struck Acrisius with lightning, leaving him hideously disfigured. After learning that killing the Kraken would allow him to have his revenge against Hades, Perseus agrees to help. He and Argos’ finest soldiers embark on a quest to find the Stygian Witches with a pair of Persian monster-hunters named Ixas (Hans Matheson) and Kucuk (Mouloud Achour), and Io following. To counter this turn of events, Hades enlists Acrisius, now called Calibos, to kill off Perseus. Hades imbues Calibos with superhuman powers.

In the woods, Perseus and his men discover a sword forged in Olympus that will only display power if it is wielded by Perseus. While separated from the group, Perseus encounters Zeus’ sacred herd of flying horses, the Pegasus. However, Perseus refuses both the sword and the pure-black Pegasus that the gods offer as assistance, as he does not wish to be a god. Calibos attacks the group and tries to murder Perseus, killing several soldiers in the process, but Calibos is unsuccessful, losing his hand before escaping. However, Calibos’s blood forms giant scorpions from the sand that attack Perseus and his group. Though they kill several scorpions, most of the group are slain, and the survivors are surrounded by more of the monsters. They are saved by the Djinn, a band of once-human desert sorcerers who have replaced their earthly flesh with ash and dark magic. The mysterious beings are able to hypnotize the scorpions into submission. Though not trusted prior to healing Perseus’s wound, the Djinn leader, Sheikh Suleiman (Ian Whyte), joins Perseus’s group. The Djinn want to see the gods’ wish for destruction fail.

The heroes arrive at Garden of Stygia, learning from the Stygian Witches that the head of the Gorgon Medusa (Natalia Vodianova) could kill the Kraken, but that Perseus and his group will die in the process. After leaving the witches, with the hunters taking their leave, Perseus is visited by Zeus who offers him asylum on Mount Olympus, but he refuses. Zeus gives him instead a golden drachma, which Perseus later learns is a means to bribe Charon for passage into the Underworld. While Io remains outside Medusa’s lair, due to a spell that forbids any woman from entering the area, Perseus’ remaining soldiers fight hard to stay alive but are turned to stone one by one by her gaze. But with Suleiman self-destructing and Draco’s sacrifice, Perseus manages to behead Medusa. Perseus emerges in time to see Calibos kill Io by stabbing her from behind. Perseus engages Calibos in combat and kills him using the sword from Olympus, turning him back into Acrisius in human form. With his final breath as Hades’s power leaves him, Acrisius tells Perseus to never become a god. Perseus stays with the dying Io until she passes on, then rides Pegasus back to Argos with Medusa’s head to find some of Argos’ citizens have formed a cult of Hades and are planning to sacrifice Andromeda to the Kraken against the king’s wishes. By then, Hades reveals to Zeus the destruction of Argos will give him enough power to overthrow the other Olympians before leaving his powerless brother to ensure his victory.

Perseus returns to Argos, but Hades sends his harpies to stop him. Perseus defeats the creatures sent by Hades and uses the head of Medusa to turn the Kraken into stone as Kepheus is killed by the cult leader, who is then crushed under the shattering Kraken. Hades appears and sneers that Perseus cannot kill him, since he is a god. Perseus retorts that while Hades can live forever, it will not be in the world of men and uses the sword to banish Hades back to the Underworld. Because Perseus has saved Argos from destruction, Andromeda suggests that Perseus become king and rule Argos at her side, but he declines. Zeus appears before Perseus again and offers to make him a god, but for a second time he refuses. Zeus warns Perseus that Hades will return to rule the world in darkness when he amasses enough fear from mankind. Since Perseus is intent on staying on Earth, Zeus resurrects Io, and the two embrace while Pegasus flies above them.

For Mother Nature, revenge is a dish best served… furry! In this hilarious family comedy with a message, greedy developers try to pave over paradise and unwittingly launch a side-splitting battle between man and nature. And anyone who doesn’t learn that “green” isn’t just the color of money might just end up as roadkill!

After transplanting his family from Chicago to the Oregon woods for his new job overseeing the construction of a supposedly “eco-friendly” housing development, Dan Sanders (Brendan Fraser) thinks his biggest problem will be helping his city-loving wife Tammy (Brooke Shields) and nature-phobic teenaged son (Matt Prokop) adjust to their new surroundings while pleasing his demanding boss (Ken Jeong). But Dan’s troubles have only begun once the local animals discover his leadership role in the destruction of their habitat. He soon lands atop their Most Wanted list, and realizes how much trouble a few feisty forest creatures can cause!

The clever critters bedevil Dan night and day, sabotaging his work, his peace of mind—and even his wardrobe. Under this concerted attack, Dan soon finds his once-perfect life in ruins. He completely fails in his efforts to trap, deter or even photograph the animal assault team and without proof of the covert woodland conspiracy against him, no one believes Dan’s claims. With his wife and son poised to abandon him, and his construction project in jeopardy, Dan escalates the feud to all-out intra-species war that can only have one winner

There are so many problems here it’s hard to know where to begin. The cast strains to create a tone of cuteness, which proves grating, while the number of odd circumstances that keep Zoe and Alex running into each other is insulting. Not only do they happen to stumble upon each other trying to nab the same cab, not once but twice, but they also randomly meet at a farmers market. I’m sure this happens in a city of nine million all the time. However, this perfectly matches the script, which is all over the place as well. There is a slapstick sequence involving fire, dirt and a water hose, a pregnant J-Lo trawling in a dumpster and a climax involving, you guessed it, a dramatic birth. These scenes speak to the depths to which The Back-Up Plan stoops.

It is nice to have Jennifer Lopez back in a romantic comedy and for the most part it is an acceptable vehicle for her. O’Loughlin is a wise choice as her leading man and the two of them make a compatible couple. You just wish the script was not as cutesy and clichéd as it is. This makes the film just an okay one rather than a thoroughly entertaining one like some of her past movies have been.

The Back Up Plan needed a back up script in which all the clichés had been eliminated and all the cuteness had been toned down a notch or two and only then it could have made a better view.

In an effort to reignite romance, Phil takes Claire to a trendy Manhattan restaurant where they can’t get a table. Phil decides to take a reservation from a no-show couple, the Tripplehorns, despite Claire’s misgivings. Halfway through their meal, they are approached by two men named Collins (Common) and Armstrong (Jimmi Simpson), who question them about a flash drive they believe Phil and Claire stole from mobster boss Joe Miletto (Ray Liotta). Phil and Claire try to explain that they are not the Tripplehorns, but the two men threaten them at gunpoint. Not seeing any other way out, Phil decides to tell them it’s in a boathouse in Central Park.

At the boathouse, Claire pretends to search; while Collins’ and Armstrong’s backs are turned, Phil hits them with a paddle and escapes with Claire on a boat. At a police station, Phil and Claire talk with Detective Arroyo (Taraji P. Henson) but discover Collins and Armstrong are also detectives, presumably on Miletto’s payroll. Realizing they can’t trust the police, they decide to find the real “Tripplehorns”. They go back to the restaurant and find their phone number.

Claire remembers one of her former clients, Holbrooke Grant (Mark Wahlberg), is a security expert. At his apartment, Grant, whom Claire flirts with, traces the signal to an apartment owned by Tom Felton. Collins and Armstrong arrive but Phil and Claire escape in one of Grant’s cars. In the car, they argue.

They arrive at Felton’s apartment and break in. They question Felton, nicknamed “Taste” (James Franco), and his girlfriend “Whippit” (Mila Kunis) about the flash drive and Joe Miletto. It turns out that they had gone to the restaurant but left when they spotted Collins. Realizing they are now in danger, the couple gives the flash drive to Phil and escape. When Phil and Claire get back in the car, Armstrong and Collins start shooting at them. Phil and Claire crash into a cab. Phil and the cab driver (J. B. Smoove) decide to drive off to get away. Phil climbs into the cab so he can navigate while Claire navigates the other car. Phil checks the flash drive on the driver’s Amazon Kindle and finds pictures of district attorney Frank Crenshaw (William Fichtner) with prostitutes. After evading Collins and Armstrong and multiple squad cars, they are eventually hit and separated by another car. The cab falls into the river; Phil and the driver escape, but without the flash drive.

In a subway, Claire determines that Felton obtained the flash drive to blackmail Crenshaw. They go back to Grant’s apartment, and Grant is reluctant to help this time after becoming exhausted from their incompetence, but Phil begs him and he agrees. Phil and Claire go to the strip club that Crenshaw frequents, with Claire under the guise of a new prostitute and Phil her pimp. Claire changes outfits and the two go into the room where Crenshaw is. After doing a pole dance for him, they confront him and tell him they are the Tripplehorns. Collins and Armstrong come in and hold them at gunpoint and take them up to the roof with Crenshaw. Miletto arrives with henchmen and it is revealed that Crenshaw has been paid by Miletto to keep him out of jail. When Phil mentions the photos, a feud escalates between the mobsters and Crenshaw, Collins, and Armstrong. Phil then asks Claire to count to three and when she does, a helicopter appears and Arroyo and the police come onto the roof to arrest Miletto, Crenshaw, and everyone else. It is revealed that Phil was wearing a wire courtesy of Grant, who informed Arroyo of the situation.

Phil and Claire enjoy breakfast at a local city diner afterward, where Phil admits that he would marry Claire and have their kids all over again if given the chance. When they arrive back home, they begin making out passionately on the front lawn for an extended period of time.

Seyfried is Chloe, a young prostitute well-versed in the finer points of subterfuge — embodying everything her clients dream. And Moore is Catherine, a successful gynaecologist — the established professional, mother, and aging woman desperately wishing for the lust-filled attentions that her husband David (Neeson) used to heap on her. After he avoids her on his birthday, “missing” a plane (and subsequently a surprise party), she becomes wary. And when he continues to flirt with every young woman he meets, Catherine becomes convinced that he is cheating.

When Catherine meets a mysteriously beautiful young woman in a restaurant bathroom (Chloe), Catherine’s confusion takes a terribly irrational turn. She is drawn to Chloe, and she wants to know for sure that her husband is cheating, so she decides to hire the young woman and tempt him. Step by step, Chloe sets out for meetings with David, always returning with tales that have the most heart-stabbingly precise details. Soon, Catherine finds herself terribly intertwined with Chloe’s life as the young woman also insinuates herself into Catherine’s — Chloe being the secret, beautiful henchwoman for Catherine, the youthful paramour for David, and even the mysterious temptress of their son, Michael (Thieriot). In typical erotic thriller fashion, things quickly barrel out of control with twists, insanity, and dysfunction.

Chloe is the North American embodiment of Anne Fontaine’s French film Nathalie…, and adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson (the skilled pen behind Secretary), the triangle between wife, husband, and prostitute is given an extra layer of interpersonal horror. Ultimately, this means a whole new ending for the film — one that manages to wrap up the plot while also leaving much teasingly ambiguous. For the most part, this works. To get to the end, one has to accept that Catherine would take this crazy path, and that Chloe would follow it as she does. (And, frankly, in a crazy world with crazy true stories everyday, this isn’t THAT unbelievable.) Nevertheless, there is disconnected feel to the film.

Where Secretary made you relate and understand the troubled Lee in spite of the fact that she used unusual means to gain strength and happiness, Chloe is a circus of bad decision-making and rationale that sometimes works, and sometimes makes little sense. In a Q&A at the festival, Cressida talked about how the story became what it did, and how she felt about the characters. The more she spoke, the more I understood the characters and her aim, and the more I appreciated the film. Unfortunately, she can’t come packaged to every screening.

Without the small nuggets from Cressida’s mindset, the performances in Chloe seem fine, but removed. On one hand, it seems fitting — the chemistry-free connections revealing the utter disconnect from life that these characters seem to live. But at the same time, this is an erotic thriller, and if you can’t feel that attraction, that need, that at-all-odds desire, it won’t unfold and grab you as it should.

What plays out perfectly, however, is the location. Wintry Toronto is captured by long-time Egoyan cinematographer Paul Sarossy, and quickly becomes a character itself, so many notable locations finally getting to be as they are, and not masked as a foreign city. The pristine world of Moore’s Yorkville (pricey hotspot where the stars descend during TIFF) clashes with the youthful bohemian shades of Seyfried’s Queen Street, and this visually exemplifies the void between these characters as they try to reach out for one another.

Ultimately, while Chloe might not connect on a personal level, it does trap you into these lurid lives that flirt with every notion of bad behavior. I just wish they were characters I could love or hate, or simply feel for. Then the experience would have been all the better.

Roger Greenberg — a former musician who works as a carpenter and whose vocation is writing eloquent letters of complaint about apparently minor inconveniences — is both heavily scarred and heavily armed. Played by Ben Stiller as a wiry, gray-haired ball of raw nerves and well-oiled defense mechanisms, Roger returns to Los Angeles after 15 years in New York and a short stay in a mental hospital after a breakdown. He roosts in the large hillside house of his brother (Chris Messina), who has gone with his wife and children to Vietnam for a long vacation.

“I’m trying to do nothing right now,” Roger explains to everyone who doesn’t ask. Whether he succeeds is an open question. He looks up some old friends, worries about the neighbors and his brother’s dog, and pursues an awkward stop-and-start romance with his brother’s personal assistant, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig). Roger, at 40, seems uncomfortably stuck in his own receding youth, but Florence, who hangs out in art galleries with her friends and sometimes sings at a half-empty hipster bar, really is 25.

Although Roger Greenberg is a world-class narcissist, “Greenberg” is not all about him. It is the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest. Mr. Stiller, suppressing his well-honed sketch comedian’s urge to wink at the audience, turns Roger into a walking challenge to the Hollywood axiom that a movie’s protagonist must be likable. But Mr. Baumbach, relishing his antihero’s obstinate difficulty — which is less an inability to connect with other people than a stubborn refusal, on hazy grounds of principle, to try — treats Roger with compassion, even tenderness.

And in finding others who are willing, sometimes against their best interests, to venture that kind of generosity, he turns what might have been a case study of neurosis into an exploration of loneliness, friendship and the sense of emotional deprivation that can fester in a landscape of comfort and privilege.

This landscape is an important part of the film, as is the city of Los Angeles, captured in its shaggy, smoggy, unglamorous beauty by the exceptionally talented cinematographer Harris Savides. The easiest rebuke to aim at Mr. Baumbach, the child of East Coast literary intellectuals and the husband of a much-admired actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who appears in “Greenberg” and shares a story credit with her husband), is that he occupies himself with a narrow and (to him) familiar swath of social reality. Fair enough, but so did Henry James. And like James — I swear I won’t push this analogy too far, lest I start sounding like the dad in “The Squid and the Whale” — Mr. Baumbach is highly sensitive to nuances of behavior and tiny distinctions of status.

To some extent, “Greenberg,” like nearly all of Mr. Baumbach’s work going back to “Kicking and Screaming,” is a comedy of manners. West Coast versions of the hyper-articulate recent college graduates of that movie, his 1995 directing debut, have grown up and been supplanted by a strange new generation. Some of the humor in “Greenberg” comes from the various collisions between youth and middle age. Kids these days! They don’t know what you’re talking about when you quote “Wall Street,” and they don’t appreciate Duran Duran. Damned Internet!

Roger drifts partly back into a circle of old friends and band mates, and seeks out Beth (Ms. Leigh), a former girlfriend who has been married and divorced since he saw her last. She, like Roger’s still loyal best friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), has been attempting to live an adult life, and several scenes capture the awkwardness of people trying to hold on to their youth and trying to find a comfortable way to be grown-ups. (By drinking beer, for example, at their children’s birthday parties.)

You don’t have the feeling that Ivan or Beth has changed much since the mid-’90s, but each has accepted the necessity of compromise. This is a basic element of maturity that Roger refuses. Beth and Ivan are trying to swim, or at least are managing to tread water, while Roger can barely dog paddle his way out of the shallow end of his brother’s pool.

It is partly arrested development — the refusal to act his age — that draws Roger to Florence, who functions less as a standard love interest than as his mirror image and moral counterweight. Like Roger, she is lonely and adrift, but her identity crisis is different from his. While he is aggressive even at times of indecision, Florence, at her most decisive, still seems tentative and hesitant.

“You need to stand up for yourself,” Florence’s employer tells her, and Roger, who takes repeated advantage of her passivity, mistakes it for low self-esteem. “You have value,” he tells her at one point, repeating another therapeutic nostrum he picked up from Beth.

“I already knew that,” Florence shouts back, in a rare display of anger. “You didn’t have to say that.”

Her problem is that she is not sure what or who else should have value to her. Florence is in the early stages of the battle for love and success, having taken her marching orders along with her college degree. But she has only a vague sense of the mission.

Roger, meanwhile, fancies himself a conscientious objector, courageously refusing to follow the rules of engagement and showering contempt on anyone who does. This gives him license to be thoughtless and mean whenever he wants, and his repeated, unprovoked cruelty to Florence may be, for some viewers, impossible to forgive.

But “Greenberg” is not easily forgotten, and the misery of Roger’s company provides its own special kind of pleasure. Mr. Baumbach’s sense of character and place is so precise — the film seems so transparent, so real — that his formal audacity almost passes unnoticed. Rather than push Roger and Florence through the grinding machinery of an overdetermined plot, he allows them to wander and sometimes to stall, to inhabit their lives fully and uneasily. They are more like characters in a French movie than the people you usually meet under the Hollywood sign.

Only at the end, in the wake of a brilliantly executed party sequence — in which Roger, the solitary Gen-Xer, finds his world of defensive ironies and carefully preserved pop cultural references overrun and trashed by a swarm of Millennials — does his arc, as residents of Hollywood might call it, become apparent. Mr. Baumbach abruptly, and with a subtle display of self-conscious wit, reveals “Greenberg” to have been a romantic comedy all along. Here we are in a car speeding toward the airport and what might be the prospect of a happy ending. And suddenly a movie about a man who is defiantly difficult to like becomes very hard not to love.

“Greenberg” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Swearing, nudity, drug use, emotional violence.

“How to Train Your Dragon” pits dragons against Vikings with one small child standing between them crying, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The Vikings are all brawn and matted, bushy hair — and there’s an implication of not much brains — while the dragons are a menagerie of fierce flying, fire-belching, multitasking creatures that fear and are feared in equal measure. From this, DreamWorks Animation tries to fashion a 3D movie that will intrigue kids and adults alike but might play raggedly in both camps.

Despite its jocular title, the film contains intense action scenes and violence, enough so that small children supplied a background of cries at one recent screening. Nonetheless, opening week should find long lines in front of cinemas. How favorably youngsters respond to the dragons might determine what kind of legs the cartoon eventually will achieve.

The film is directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who did the marvelous “Lilo & Stitch.” In many ways, it’s the same movie: A child adopts, then tames a lethal creature.

But the intimacy and pop culture references of the “Lilo & Stitch” story are jettisoned in favor of ancient warriors and mythical creatures that feel remote. It’s hard to form a rooting interest in either Vikings or dragons.

More curious from an animation standpoint are the dull human characters. They are plastic creatures that look like ads for children’s dolls. Most of the male Vikings come off as no-neck athletes on steroids. The youngsters look closer to cartoon humans, and at least they come in different sizes, with our protagonist and a valiant young Viking girl who catches his eye being downright skinny. What are they eating that everyone else is not?

The centerpiece of the movie is a developing friendship between a Viking boy, Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), and a dragon nicknamed Toothless. By befriending rather than killing a wounded dragon — as tradition and genes should dictate — Hiccup realizes that everything his elders know about dragons is wrong.

Dragons are trainable, peaceable and affectionate. But try telling that to tribal elders or your father (Gerard Butler) — who just happens to be the chief — or even that friendly dragon master (Craig Ferguson, thickening that Scottish brogue even more if such a thing were possible).

There are side issues here for the young protagonist, who tries to win over his dad and a young Viking girl (America Ferrera) while not embarrassing himself in front of other Viking teens. It’s all standard-issue coming-of-age stuff. Recasting the formula in a Nordic neverland doesn’t freshen things up much.

The film’s calling card is action. The extended battles and flying sequences — Hiccup trains Toothless to allow the boy to ride him with a saddle — provide plenty of thrills. Indeed, the directors and their animation team really seem to perk up during these bravado sequences.

Otherwise, the visual element is disappointing. Beyond the plasticity of the humans, the world of the story feels sketchy at best. The cold, glum Norse Isle of Berk, where everyone lives — borrowed from a book series by British author Cressida Cowell — grows wearisome, and its other world, that of the dinosaurs, never comes to life.

There is a wide array of dragons flying through the air, but the film introduces them so quickly that you never know one from the other. The film treats them with ambivalence as the animators can’t decide between ferocity or cuddliness. Toothless has a kind of feline look, and the others look like they belong in a Chinatown parade.

“Dragon” reps a solid effort from DreamWorks, but the audience perhaps feels the effort more than it should.

Former soldier Remy is one of the best organ repo men in the business. But when he suffers a cardiac failure on the job, he awakens to find himself fitted with the company’s top-of-the-line heart-replacement… as well as a hefty debt. But a side effect of the procedure is that his heart’s no longer in the job. When he can’t make the payments, The Union sends its toughest enforcer, Remy’s former partner Jake, to track him down.