George Clooney's new movie -- as star and director -- is the historical sports romantic comedy Leatherheads. Set in the world of early pro football in the 1920s, it's the goofy tale of Clooney's team owner vying with his new coach (played by John Krasinski) for the hand of Renee Zellweger.

Can't make it to the theater? Start with the 1932 Marx Brothers comedy Horse Feathers, in which Groucho plays a college prof who hires fools Harpo and Chico to help his university win a big football game. As you might imagine, surreal chaos ensues. Then move on to the uber romantic comedy, 1938's Bringing Up Baby, in which Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and a leopard named Baby stumble through adventures in love and paleontology.

In The Ruins, which opens this weekend, a gaggle of young Americans abroad in Mexico encounter a particularly rapacious wild, weedy plant that, well, worms its way into their vacation and doesn't want to leave.

Can't make it to the theater? Check out the 1962 British science-fiction horror flick The Day of the Triffids, in which a strange comet forces all plants to pull up their roots and go on a homicidal rampage. Then watch National Lampoon's European Vacation again, to remind you just how bad foreign holidays can get as Chevy Chase and family strike a path of accidental crime, mistaken identity, and general bedlam across the Continent.

Imagination becomes reality in the new fantasy film, Nim's Island, based on a young adult novel about a young girl (played in the film by Abigail Breslin) who has to rescue her father (Gerard Butler) from a mysterious island with the unlikely "help" of her favorite fictional character, "Alex Rover," the world's greatest adventurer (also Butler).

Can't make it to the theater? Arrange your own little film festival with last year's Bridge to Terabithia, about the imaginary world two children create as their own personal playground, and -- of course -- the exploits of the world's real greatest adventurer in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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