FRUITVALE STATION

Marvel Studios' recent spate of superhero movies has trained us - or tried to train us, at any rate - to stick around for at least the first few minutes of the end credits, offering the promise of a bonus scene designed to build excitement for comic-book adventures yet to come. (Not to give the details away, but Marvel's new The Wolverine features a happy doozy of one promoting 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.) Yet while they couldn't possibly have been expecting this same sort of credit cookie at the independent drama Fruitvale Station, the audience members with whom I saw the film stayed similarly glued to their seats, almost as though none of them was quite ready for the experience to be over. Given how haunting and emotionally overpowering writer/director Ryan Coogler's debut feature is, it would be impossible to blame them.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN

At the start of the Roland Emmerich thriller White House Down, Channing Tatum's military veteran John Cale is seen applying for a position with the president of the United States' Secret Service detail. By the film's end, he'll have rescued hostages, shot innumerable bad guys, ensured peace in the Middle East, averted nuclear apocalypse, and saved the commander in chief's life several times over. In short: most impressive job interview ever.

THE PURGE

If you blended The Hunger Games, David Fincher's Panic Room, and Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery" with generous helpings of ice, you'd wind up with the scare-flick smoothie that is The Purge. An eventually underwhelming yet bluntly effective chiller by writer/director James DeMonaco, the movie, admittedly, does lose its way before its 90 minutes are up. But considering how few modern releases in its genre find their way at all, it's hard to deny the primal pleasures of DeMonaco's outing, even if the film remains more thought-provoking in concept than it proves to be on-screen.

THE HANGOVER PART III

Not long into The Hangover Part III, our mishap-prone heroes portrayed by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis are seen sipping beers at a karaoke bar, discussing the best way to handle their latest mess initiated by Ken Jeong's eccentric gangster/eternal thorn-in-the-side Mr. Chow. Though this might constitute a minor spoiler, the casual drinks consumed in this scene are, to my recollection, the only drinks - indeed, the only judgment-impairing substances of any kind - consumed in the entire movie. That makes director Todd Phillips' outing a Hangover without hangovers. In the end, it's also a Hangover without The Hangover.