Caryn James

Child's Play 3, directed by Jack Bender, misses the sharpness and dark humor that the director and co-writer Tom Holland brought to the original.

As directed by the actor Dennis Dugan, everyone seems to be yelling their lines and making huge hand gestures instead of acting.

With its cardboard family and familiar aliens, MAC and Me would seem like the generic version of E. T. if it were not so full of brand-name commercials.

When Stoney explains that Milk Duds belong to one of the four major food groups, the dairy group, that's about as funny as things get. For a film that prides itself on throwing around Pauly-isms like fully (meaning yes), and grindage (food), Encino Man is surprisingly not buff (cool).

There have been worse ideas for innocuous summer films, but not many worse executions. The slapstick is tame and predictable. The characters and their inspirational message are served up as neatly - there's no avoiding this - as if they were in commercials.

Anyone who has watched television for even a night will be able to predict every scene in She's Out of Control with total accuracy. It is an extended version of familiar, bland sitcom situations, with Mr. Danza playing a smoother-edged version of his character on the endlessly running hit ''Who's the Boss?''

But the formula is pretty long in the tooth by now, and all the extra turns of plot can't disguise that.

Lorraine Gary has some affecting moments as Ellen, but Jaws the Revenge is mild and predictable, the very things an adventure movie should never be.

But (Jason) will never change and never die, not while cheap, dull ax-murder movies can yield one witty, misleading, probably lucrative commercial.

The New Blood only wishes it had something really new to add to the formula...There is a lot less blood, less screaming, less energy in this installment, as if Jason has become rather bored with his job.

Movies don't get more derivative or less comic than this.

It may seem very on the nose that the word "disaster" is right there in the title, but then nothing seems too leaden for this fiasco.

But mostly the satire is as dated as the recruiters' plaid jackets, as lame as the Johnny Walker joke.

No one expects realism from a movie called Teen Wolf Too... still, the film makers could pretend to know what college is like, might try to liven up the kindly werewolf formula.

The film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.

Gross-out humor for children, cynically packaged with goody-goody morals that wouldn't convince the most naive parent or child.

Duty Free is warm, personal, beautifully structured and socially relevant as it creates a vivid portrait of its real-life heroine and the ageism she encounters. Smoothly edited into a swift 71 minutes, the film rarely goes beneath the surface of its issues, but that surface is smart and, taking its cues from Rebecca, refreshingly unsentimental.

Graceful but slight, in the end The Movie Teller tries to do too much and accomplishes too little to fulfill its big ambitions.

Even when it chooses to put the rosiest gloss on things, though, the film is bracing and inspiring, giving some talented conductors much-deserved visibility.