If spring break wasn’t lengthy enough, plenty of good and not-so-good movies will be released during spring term to further escape from textbooks.
But moviegoers might want to save their box office money as May brings movies that are sure to become blockbusters. Until then, other movies are available to hold students over.
This weekend brings a star-studded cast in “Lucky Number Slevin” with Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman. The thriller plots Slevin (Hartnett) trying to defend himself against New York City’s rival crime bosses.
If “Slevin” is trying to be too cool, try “The Benchwarmers,” also to be released April 7. Jon Heder will trade his moon boots for a baseball mitt as the Napoleon Dynamite star and his nerdy friends, played by David Spade and Rob Schneider, compete in a baseball league.
Hollywood releases “Scary Movie 4” on April 14, knocking off scary movies such as “The Village” and “Saw” for the sake of laughter.
Filmmakers David Zucker and Bob Weiss promise to poke fun at music, current events, celebrities and pop culture as a group of friends tries to save the world from alien invasion.
Need something more serious? Based on the novel by Gerald Petievich, “The Sentinel” is about a Secret Service agent trying to prove his innocence after he is wrongly accused of plotting an assassination against the president. The thriller will be released April 21.
Another adaptation to be released is “Silent Hill” in which a woman collides with strange beings in another dimension as she searches for her daughter. The horror movie hits theaters April 21.
“United 93” tells the story of the takeoff and hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When the passengers discover hijackers are steering the plane toward Washington, D.C., they take action. The movie opens April 28, a date that also brings “R.V.” In “R.V.,” Robin Williams – venturing far from his superb performance in “Good Morning, Vietnam” – stars in the movie in which a family treks across the country in an RV. Does “Johnson Family Vacation” ring a bell?
Tom Cruise will go from jumping on Oprah’s couch to starring once again as Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible III,” six years after the second installment hit theaters. Little is known about the plot, but Greg Dean Schmitz, creator of “Greg’s Previews” hosted by Yahoo! Movies, predicts “it will feature at least one scene each of Ethan Hunt ripping a mask off his face and dangling precipitously from a very high altitude.” “M:I:III” opens May 5.
On May 19, “Over the Hedge” and “The Da Vinci Code” will compete head-to-head at the box office.
“Da Vinci,” based on Dan Brown’s popular novel, will star Tom Hanks as Dr. Robert Langdon. Willis will return to theaters in May, but this time as a voice in the animation “Over the Hedge,” based on a newspaper comic strip in which a raccoon and his animal friends try to coexist with humans.
Memorial Day weekend brings “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the third installment in the X-Men movie series, based on the Marvel Comics strip, set to open May 26.

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