POMPEII

About a half-hour into Paul W.S. Anderson's Pompeii, the film's protagonist - a gladiator-turned-slave amusingly named Milo - hears the unfamiliar sound of the nearby Mount Vesuvius preparing to erupt. "It is the mountain," says Milo's comrade Atticus. "It grumbles from time to time." So do movie reviewers, and this latest 3D action spectacle by the director of Mortal Kombat, Death Race, and a trio of Resident Evil flicks would, at first glance, appear to be exactly the sort of thing I'd personally grumble about: a predictably corny, derivative, overscaled costume party with loads of generic violence and nothing in the way of subtlety or emotional nuance.

Yet while it's easy to name the movie's most direct influences, Gladiator and Titanic chief among them, what I didn't at all expect was for this swords-and-sandals outing to be so thoroughly, cheerfully indebted to 1970s disaster epics in the vein of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure; Pompeii, to its cheeky credit, is kind of like 1974's Earthquake with the ancient Roman city cast in the role of Los Angeles.

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.

ARGO

It sounds like an all-too-Hollywood idea for a high-concept suspense thriller: A sextet of State Department employees are trapped in Iran, and their only hope for escape lies with an ingenious CIA official who plans to free the Americans by having them pose as a location-scouting team for a Canadian science-fiction movie. Yet within its first minutes, director/star Ben Affleck's Argo - based on a recently declassified chapter of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 - registers as terrifically, nerve-rackingly authentic, even if the film's most enjoyable elements are, in truth, as Hollywood as they come.

ONE DAY

When Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) first meet in director Lone Scherfig's One Day, it's the morning after their 1988 university graduation, and a few minutes before the happily drunken pair tumbles into Emma's bed. They don't wind up consummating their flirtation, but the young Brits - and best-friends-to-be - seem perfectly content to smile and snuggle while the sun rises, and Emma makes the observation that the new day, July 15, is the English near-holiday of St. Swithin's Day. Or, as Scherfig's comedy/drama/romance might cause me to think of it from now on, St. "Well, Isn't That an Astounding Coincidence?" Day.