Caryn James

Their best moments are some throwaway routines; they weep in the car as they sing along to the Carpenters' "Superstar." More often, the movie goes for stale, obvious sight gags like Tommy's slow destruction of Richard's precious car. As mismatched-buddy teams go, Felix and Oscar have nothing to worry about here.

These robots transform in a flash; the colors are shocking pinks and electric greens; the film is packed with one-to-one combat, large-scale battles and exploding planets. Despite these improvements, though, the movie is not for anyone too grown-up.

The Seventh Continent is one of the most stylish films in this year's New Directors/New Films series. With its fragmented pattern of beautifully composed and repeated images from middle-class life, it rejuvenates a 1960's style that would seem to be exhausted by now. But the Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke pulls viewers through a good portion of the film on the sheer strength of his visual flair, avoiding the classic trap of how to create a film about boredom that is not boring.

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.

[A] delicate, lovingly photographed, strongly acted coming-of-age story.

The movie The Baby-Sitters Club offers the same comfort factor as the books, but suffers from a definite lack of excitement.

This slick movie proves how much fun it can be to watch first-rate actors challenge our credulity and rise above a second-rate script.

Don't be misled by commercials that make The Ref look like slapstick silliness. This is a grown-up film that delights in undermining Christmas cliches.

Johnny Mnemonic looks and feels like a shabby imitation of Blade Runner and Total Recall. It is a disaster in every way.

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

This huge cliche of a movie isn't even a distant relation of films like The Color of Money, which can actually make you root for hustlers. The Big Town only proves we've gone back to the 1950's one time too many.

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

What's the differences between the Care Bears television show on Saturday morning and The Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland...? The movie is longer, and you will have to pay money to see it - about as much as it appears the producers spent to make it.

Fast, funny, full of straight-ahead action and tongue-in-cheek jokes, Maverick is Lethal Weapon meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That combination won't win any prizes for originality, but it works like a movie mogul's dream and sets the summer-film season off to an unbeatable start.

With a little more wit and a little less blood, Renegades could have been Lethal Weapon Jr. It is a fast, violent, implausible film about mismatched partners, and though it doesn't exactly break the bounds of its trashy genre, it's not at all bad for what it is.

The director and co-writer, John Dahl, keeps up perfect swift timing throughout the film, playfully loading on every suspense-genre trick he can imagine.

Looking through these layers of time, this flashy, extravagant rock musical, which opens today at the Ziegfeld, elevates style to a symptom and cause of social change. And though it aims for more coherence than it delivers, it has endless flair with no self-importance...For all its unevenness, Absolute Beginners is high pop culture.

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?''