Get ready for a bumper selection of big-screen releases appearing in cinemas over the forthcoming summer months. From long-awaited prequels and sequels, animated children's favorites and movies for the mature, to action-packed adventures and hilarious comedies, David Germain provides a rundown of the ones to watch.

A load of laughs

In real life, hangovers make us promise to be good and never do it again, until the next time. In Hollywood, fans have been anxious to do it again ever since they walked out of the surprise comedy blockbuster "The Hangover" two years ago.

As the posters proclaim: the wolf pack is back, with Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis reuniting for another clueless morning after in "The Hangover Part II," which leads a big summer lineup of comedy, romance and family fun.

In the next chapter of "The Hangover," Stu (Helms) is getting married in Thailand, where he and his buddies (Cooper, Galifianakis and Justin Bartha) aim for a quiet pre-wedding brunch to avoid repeating the mistakes they made in Las Vegas.

Instead, they manage to pack another lost weekend into a single night, one guy awakening with a new hairdo, another with a tattoo, and all of them with hurting heads and mysteries from the night before to solve on the streets of Bangkok.

Dealing with exotic ways is also at the heart of "Cars 2," in which Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen heads out on an international racing circuit, where rickety tow-truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) is mistaken for an undercover agent and pressed into service by a slick British spymaster (Michael Caine).

In "Kung Fu Panda 2," Jack Black's tubby hero Po has settled in as head of a martial-arts team that includes a menagerie of experts voiced by Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu.

Cameron Diaz's character in "Bad Teacher" was never meant for the classroom.

She's rude, raunchy and boozy, with a lesson plan mainly aimed at hooking a rich substitute teacher (Justin Timberlake) while fending off advances from a nice-guy gym instructor (Jason Segel).

Jason Bateman and his co-stars are similarly unrestrained in "Horrible Bosses" and a second comedy he has this summer, "The Change-Up," with Ryan Reynolds.

"Horrible Bosses" features Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis as underlings who take bad advice from an ex-con (Jamie Foxx) about how to do away with their awful overseers (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell).

"The Change-Up" stars Reynolds and Bateman as old friends with drastically different lives - one's a stressed-out lawyer and family man, the other's a laid-back slacker - who wake up after a drunken night to discover they've switched bodies.

Other comedy highlights:

"Bridesmaids": Even as her own life is falling apart, a maid of honor (Kristen Wiig) aims to lead a pack of bridesmaids on a grand wedding ride for her best friend (Maya Rudolph).

"Something Borrowed": Romance and friendship collide after a woman (Ginnifer Goodwin) spends the night with the fiance of her best pal (Kate Hudson).

"Crazy, Stupid, Love": Steve Carell goes awkwardly back on the dating market after his wife (Julianne Moore) gives him the boot, and a smooth operator (Ryan Gosling) takes him on as "wing man."

"Zookeeper": A lonely animal tender (Kevin James) gets lessons on courting from a menagerie of talking critters.

"Jumping the Broom": Two families from wildly different worlds converge for a wedding weekend on Martha's Vineyard. With Angela Bassett, Paula Patton, Laz Alonso and Mike Epps.

"Monte Carlo": Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy are friends who land in a fairy-tale European vacation after one of them is mistaken for an heiress.

"Mr. Popper's Penguins": A real-estate kingpin (Jim Carrey) is forced to become caretaker for six penguins he inherits.

"Winnie the Pooh": The honey-loving bear returns with pals Tigger, Piglet, Roo and Eeyore, who gets some help finding a new tail after losing his own.

"The Smurfs": The little blue guys find themselves exiled to Manhattan's Central Park, scrambling to find their way home after an evil wizard banishes them.



It's all about action

Pirate Jack Sparrow embarks on a new quest. Wizard Harry Potter comes to the end of his saga. And swarms of new superheroes come out swinging.

Add in a third round of giant robots from space, the dawn of a planet of intelligent apes and an alien invasion in the Wild West, and Hollywood has one of its most action-packed summers ever in store.

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint head back to Hogwarts one last time for the final showdown between good and evil wizards with "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2."

The adaptation of JK Rowling's finale to her fantasy series was split into two films, the first leaving off with last fall's cliffhanger involving the death match between Harry (Radcliffe) and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes).

"Deathly Hallows: Part 2" joins other action franchises that are going the 3-D route for the first time, among them the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Transformers" sequels.

"Dark of the Moon" reunites "Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf and director Michael Bay as an event from Earth's past touches off a new round in the struggle between two warring robot races.

After wrapping up the original story line in a trilogy, "Pirates of the Caribbean" returns in a stand-alone story that sends Depp's Jack Sparrow on a hunt for the fountain of youth.

"On Stranger Tides" co-stars Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane, with Geoffrey Rush back as Jack's old nemesis Barbossa.

Superheroes are everywhere this summer, with the stars of "Thor" and "Captain America" making solo debuts before joining the all-star lineup of summer 2012's "The Avengers."

"Captain America" stars Chris Evans, padding his superhero resume after co-starring as the Human Torch in the "Fantastic Four" flicks.

Evans' Steve Rogers is a 98-pound weakling who volunteers for a military program that bulks him up into super-soldier Captain America, leading a team of heroes battling arch-villain Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).

"Thor" casts the Norse god of thunder into exile among puny humans on Earth, where he hooks up with a team of scientists (Natalie Portman among them) and joins the fight against a bad guy from his own realm.

While Thor is sent down to the minors, the hero of "Green Lantern" is called up from Earth to join a league of galactic peacekeepers.

Ryan Reynolds stars as an ordinary guy who gains superpowers from a ring bestowed by a dying alien. As the first human to join the Green Lantern Corps - essentially, interstellar cops on the beat - his character becomes the key to stopping an evil force.

"X-Men: First Class" features James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as the future Professor X and Magneto - superpowered mutants who start as allies but end up deadly enemies in their quest to find a place for their freak-of-nature kinsmen.

Another prequel, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," has James Franco and Freida Pinto leading the cast as research into simian intelligence puts the world under new management.

Interspecies conflict comes to the Wild West, too, in "Cowboys & Aliens" as a mysterious gunslinger (Daniel Craig) and a cattle baron (Harrison Ford) put together a posse of townsfolk, outlaws and Apache Indians to go after bad guys from space in 1873.

"Lost" creator JJ Abrams created his own mash-up with "Super 8," combining two projects he had been developing: A story inspired by his boyhood filmmaking endeavors and a sci-fi adventure about a train that derails while carrying an alien presence from Area 51.

Other action highlights:

"Fright Night": The remake of the 1980s horror comedy stars Colin Farrell as a newcomer targeting the kid next door (Anton Yelchin), who has discovered his neighbor's a vampire.

"30 Minutes or Less": Jesse Eisenberg stars in an action comedy about a pizza delivery guy abducted by crooks and forced to rob a bank.

"Conan the Barbarian": The new take on the ancient warrior has Conan (Jason Momoa) on a personal vendetta that turns into a heroic mission against supernatural evil.

"Priest": A warrior priest (Paul Bettany) in a world besieged by vampires sets out to rescue his abducted niece before the blood-suckers make her one of their own.




Films for grown-ups

Movie screens this summer are not entirely booked with superheroes, kiddie fare and goofy buddy flicks. Plenty of mature dramas and comedies about dealing with - or escaping from - the problems of real life arrive alongside the season's big studio offerings.

If there's a grown-up blockbuster in the making for summer, it's the adaptation of the literary sensation "The Help," which has a built-in audience of millions of readers - women who can turn out in huge numbers when the right female-driven film shows up.

"The Help" stars Emma Stone as an aspiring white writer stirring up her Mississippi home town during the civil-rights movement in 1963 by chronicling the lives of black maids.

The summer lineup for the mature set also features Mel Gibson's reclamation project "The Beaver," directed by co-star Jodie Foster.

Gibson plays a husband and father in the depths of suicidal depression that runs in his family. Thrown out of the house by his wife (Foster) and scorned by his oldest son (Anton Yelchin), Gibson's Walter Black struggles to pull back from the brink by communicating through a beaver puppet he finds in the trash.

Other grown-up highlights:

"The Tree of Life": Writer-director Terrence Malick chronicles a difficult father-son relationship from the boy's youth in the 1950s through disillusioned adulthood.

"Larry Crowne": Tom Hanks falls on hard times as a downsized box-company worker who goes back to college and joins an assemblage of campus oddballs while developing a crush on his public-speaking teacher (Julia Roberts).

"One Day": A single day on the calendar becomes a momentous one for Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in an adaptation of the novel about a relationship that plays out over a 20-year succession of July 15ths.

"Midnight in Paris": Woody Allen spins a romance in the city of light centered on a couple (Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams) and the temptations they encounter there.

"The Debt": Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain star in a tale spanning 30 years as a retired Mossad agent goes back on the clock to take care of loose ends from an old mission to hunt down a Nazi war criminal.

"Everything Must Go": A relapsed boozer (Will Ferrell) loses it all - his job, his wife, the keys to his house - and decides to camp out on his front lawn for a massive yard sale to unload all the baggage in his life. With Rebecca Hall.

"Submarine": This Brit coming-of-age story focuses on a teen aiming to preserve his parents' marriage and rev up their romance while trying to get his own sex life going. With Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine.