Janet Maslin

This Ninja Turtles tale is less violent and more scenic than its predecessors, since it gets the title characters out of the sewer and transports them back to feudal Japan.

Flattering the daylights out of Rob Reiner and his Spinal Tap crew, Rusty Cundieff turns Fear of a Black Hat into an unapologetic Spinal Tap imitation. And there's no point in faulting Mr. Cundieff for such derivativeness, because Fear of a Black Hat is too savvy and cheerful to warrant complaints.

Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.

Walter Hill, the director of such beautiful but stilted tough guy movies as ''The Warriors'' and ''The Long Riders,'' has attempted something very different in 48 Hours a male-buddy action film that's positively witty and warm-hearted compared with his other work.

This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.

Helen Hunt is a real scene-stealer as a girl who wears things like toy dinosaurs in her hair, in keeping with the film's relentlessly silly mood. The audience at the National Theater seemed giddy enough in its own right.

Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.

Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.

Little Buddha displays a deliberate innocence that suits its subject, even if it contrasts so markedly with much of Mr. Bertolucci's moodier, more unsettling work.

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.

Freddy Krueger is the most talkative of slashers, and also the most creative. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, he displays a great debt to Dali in concocting surreal visions for his prey. When Freddy enters the dreams of his teen-age victims, ordinary objects become armed and dangerous.

Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.

It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.

A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.

Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.

Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.

Wag the Dog, the poison-tipped political satire that's as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist.

A film like this is quite naturally a showcase for its star, and as Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona.

Local Hero is a funny movie, but it's more apt to induce chuckles than knee-slapping. Like Gregory's Girl, it demonstrates Mr. Forsyth's uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn't easily explained.

Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.

A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.

More so than the exuberant movie miracles that came before it, this latest animated juggernaut has the feeling of a clever, predictable product. To its great advantage, it has been contrived with a spirited, animal-loving prettiness no child will resist.

But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.

Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.

Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.

Both actors play their roles so trickily that tensions escalate until the horror grows unimaginatively gothic.